{"id":236819,"date":"2026-04-28T13:19:00","date_gmt":"2026-04-28T17:19:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/28\/chinas-deepseek-v4-and-qwen-reshape-the-open-source-ai-race\/"},"modified":"2026-04-28T19:15:10","modified_gmt":"2026-04-28T23:15:10","slug":"chinas-deepseek-v4-and-qwen-reshape-the-open-source-ai-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/2026\/04\/28\/chinas-deepseek-v4-and-qwen-reshape-the-open-source-ai-race\/","title":{"rendered":"China\u2019s DeepSeek V4 And Qwen Reshape The Open-Source AI Race"},"content":{"rendered":"

China\u2019s DeepSeek V4 And Qwen Reshape The Open-Source AI Race<\/a><\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/jonmarkman\/2026\/04\/28\/chinas-deepseek-v4-and-qwen-reshape-the-open-source-ai-race\/<\/a><\/p>\n

Publish Date: 2026-04-28 13:19:00<\/a><\/p>\n

Source Domain: www.forbes.com<\/a><\/p>\n

Illustration of DeepSeek AI on January 29, 2025. DeepSeek AI is a Chinese artificial intelligence company and the name of its conversational agent, which exploits a large language model. In early 2025, DeepSeek unveils a new model published in open source under the MIT license. Artificial intelligence. (Photo by Riccardo Milani \/ Hans Lucas \/ Hans Lucas via AFP) (Photo by RICCARDO MILANI\/Hans Lucas\/AFP via Getty Images)<\/span><\/p>\n

Hans Lucas\/AFP via Getty Images<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, DeepSeek did something that put the entire US AI press into motion. The Chinese AI lab released V4-Pro and V4-Flash on April 24 under an MIT open-source license. Two days later, on Saturday, it announced a 75% promotional discount on V4-Pro. Less than 24 hours after that, on Sunday, it cut input cache hit prices to one-tenth of what they had already been.<\/p>\n

The numbers, when stacked, are genuinely arresting. V4-Pro now lists at $1.74 per million input tokens and $3.48 per million output tokens. With the promotional discount applied, output drops to roughly $0.87 per million. Compare that to GPT-5.5 at $30.21 per million output tokens, or Claude Opus 4.7 at $25. By that math, DeepSeek is shipping output that is 35 times cheaper than GPT-5.5 and 29 times cheaper than Opus 4.7<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

A senior DeepSeek researcher posted on X late Sunday night: “Go wild and have fun.” A few hours later, another X user replied: “This is not normal. Every AI company is out here chasing profits. Why does DeepSeek keep dropping prices this hard?”<\/p>\n

That last question is the right one. But the answer it leads to is not the one most coverage is providing.<\/p>\n

The DeepSeek price war is real. The story being told about what it means is wrong on at least three different levels.<\/strong> Each of those levels matters separately, and together they paint a much more interesting picture than the panic narrative suggests.<\/p>\n

The DeepSeek Theatre<\/h2>\n

Start with what is actually true and what is performative.<\/p>\n

DeepSeek has built genuine technical capability. V4-Pro uses a…<\/p>\n

Source<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

China\u2019s DeepSeek V4 And Qwen Reshape The Open-Source AI Race https:\/\/www.forbes.com\/sites\/jonmarkman\/2026\/04\/28\/chinas-deepseek-v4-and-qwen-reshape-the-open-source-ai-race\/ Publish Date: 2026-04-28 13:19:00…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":236820,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"fifu_image_url":"https:\/\/imageio.forbes.com\/specials-images\/imageserve\/69f0e8ac8b43c042dc746a5c\/0x0.jpg?format=jpg&height=900&width=1600&fit=bounds","fifu_image_alt":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[14],"tags":[20,18],"class_list":["post-236819","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-large-language-model"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236819"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=236819"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236819\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":236821,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/236819\/revisions\/236821"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/236820"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=236819"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=236819"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/news-you-need.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=236819"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}