On July 31 this year, DeepSeek announced through its API documentation that the official version of the DeepSeek-V4-Flash API had been launched for public beta testing. The benchmark report for the official version of DeepSeek-V4-Flash shows that its AI single-task cost is approximately 60% lower than that of GPT-5.6 Luna.
According to weekly statistics from OpenRouter, the world’s largest AI aggregation platform, DeepSeek-V4-Flash ranked first globally with 7.22 trillion tokens processed. As a result, the related topic of the “DeepSeek kill line” has also sparked heated discussion among netizens.
According to discussions among netizens, DeepSeek has drawn a brutal “industry life-or-death line” across the global AI sector with the extreme cost-effectiveness of the official version of V4-Flash. It has not only forced Silicon Valley giants to cut prices overnight, but also left countless mid-tier models facing a struggle for survival.
Guan Haitao, Honor’s global chief marketing officer, also joined the discussion today. He said:
Ferrari performance at the price of an electric scooter! The optimization of per-token cost and performance carries at least three top-level significances domestically, in China, and internationally!
It is worth noting that the artificial intelligence industry has entered a new stage of development. To respond to competition from a new generation of Chinese models, such as Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 and DeepSeek’s V4 Flash, major AI companies around the world are significantly lowering product prices while also improving the capabilities of entry-level models.