Hong Kong – DeepSeek rolled out preview versions of a new flagship artificial intelligence model on April 24, introducing its biggest upgrades a year after upending Silicon Valley with a groundbreaking platform.
The Chinese start-up unveiled the V4 Flash and V4 Pro models along with fairly basic details on pricing, parameters and the ability to process a maximum output of 384,000 tokens.
DeepSeek ignited a trillion-dollar stock market sell-off in 2025 with the release of the R1, an open source model that mimics the process of human reasoning. R1 rivalled the performance of cutting-edge AI systems from companies like OpenAI but was purportedly built for a fraction of the cost.
Almost overnight, some tech firms and investors began rethinking the wisdom of pouring billions of dollars into AI development. Those outlays have since sprung back, as American technology giants are projected to invest around US$650 billion (S$830 billion) in 2026 on AI infrastructure and data centres. BLOOMBERG
