DeepSeek V4 vs GPT-5.5: Cheapest Frontier Model in 2026?

DeepSeek V4GPT-5.5
arenaElo13951432
humanEval9194.2
sweBench6266
mmlu91.593
gpqa7368.7
aime9092
Price in/out ($/M)$1.74 / $3.48$12 / $48

Our verdict

GPT-5.5 ($12/$48 per M tokens) leads on Arena Elo, multimodal breadth (audio in/out) and creative writing. DeepSeek V4 ($1.74/$3.48) is roughly 85% cheaper for similar frontier-tier reasoning and offers full open-weights under MIT: no vendor lock-in. For consumer-facing voice products, GPT-5.5 wins; for batch document analysis or self-hosted enterprise, V4 is the rational choice.

DeepSeek V4 · GPT-5.5 · All AI model comparisons