DeepSeek V4 vs DeepSeek R1: Should You Upgrade?

DeepSeek V4DeepSeek R1
arenaElo13951389
humanEval9190.2
sweBench6249.2
mmlu91.590.8
gpqa7371.5
aime9079.8
Price in/out ($/M)$1.74 / $3.48$0.7 / $2.5

Our verdict

V4 supersedes R1 on every axis: 1M context (vs 128K), native vision, +1.5 GPQA, +0.8 HumanEval, and a hybrid sparse attention that uses ~10% of R1's KV cache at 1M tokens. R1 still wins on raw input price ($0.55 vs $1.74), so keep R1 for batch reasoning where context fits in 128K and budget is tight. For everything else, upgrade.

DeepSeek V4 · DeepSeek R1 · All AI model comparisons