DeepSeek in October 2026: Models, Capital and Ecosystem
Models & Pricing
- Sept 10: V4.1-Flash — 552B MoE, native vision, 70% output cut
- Off-peak halves plus $0.003 cache hits reset the industry price floor
Ecosystem
- Sept 11: Tencent fully integrates the new models
- Sept 30: Full Ascend stack open-sourced, mirroring CUDA
Market & Capital
- Oct 5: Bloomberg puts the US-China benchmark gap at 3%
- Oct 8: 3x OpenAI API usage; OpenAI goes free in segments
- Oct 12–13: $400M Winverse AI seed lead; ~100B yuan round near close at ~500B valuation
What's Next
No official V5 timeline (September rumors unconfirmed); attention shifts to the year-end IPO and embodied AI.