❯ DeepSeek V4-Flash 0731 Third-Party Benchmarks Are In: Just 13B Active Parameters, Agent Score Beats Its Own Pro Edition

BENCHMARKSDeepSeek’s V4-Flash 0731, released late last month, was the subject of a wave of third-party evaluations over the past day: the official TerminalBench 2.1 score of 82.7 matches exactly what independent evaluator Ante harness produced, and the latter also ranks it above xAI’s Grok-4.5. Semiconductor research firm SemiAnalysis publicly congratulated the team, saying it substantially outperforms NVIDIA’s Nemotron3 Ultra on agent tasks while using 4.2x fewer active parameters and nearly half the total parameters.

ARCHITECTUREThe result was delivered by a “small” model: a mixture-of-experts architecture with 284B total parameters and just 13B active, carrying a 1 million token context. The model structure is identical to the earlier Flash-Preview — only post-training was redone — and TerminalBench jumped from 72.1 on Pro-Preview to 82.7, the budget version overtaking its own premium edition by 14.7%.

NINE-MONTH JUMPThe longitudinal comparison is even more striking. Data compiled by researcher Teortaxes shows V3.2 from nine months ago scored just 4.0% on comparable agent benchmarks, while 0731 delivers 61.4% at one-third the cost. Multiple evaluators reach the same price-performance verdict: Vals measured it as 28x cheaper than Grok, with comparable scores.

PRESSUREThe pressure first lands on the pricing sheets of closed-source labs. When an open-weight, 13B-active model can crack the top tier of agent leaderboards, enterprise customers buying coding and agent solutions will need new reasons to pay a premium for closed-source APIs. The developer community is already predicting that, at this post-training iteration pace, DeepSeek touching closed-flagship score territory before year’s end is no joke.

▪ SIGNALRedoing post-training once was enough to overtake the premium version, showing the bar for agent capability is shifting from “stacking parameters” to “refining the recipe” — precisely the stage where the open-source camp is closing the gap fastest.