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Morning Edition · Sunday, November 1, 2026Published at 1:20 AM EST · New York
DeepSeek's V4.1-Flash paper cuts the global KV cache to 890 bytes per token for a 552-billion-parameter model
Cross-layer cache reuse and 4-bit (FP4) storage of the key-value (KV) cache cut the cache held in high-bandwidth memory (HBM) to about a quarter of V4-Flash's, the weights ship under an MIT license, and the result lowers the price floor that closed APIs charging $4 and $1.25 per million input tokens must compete against.
DeepSeek's technical report on V4.1-Flash describes a multimodal mixture-of-experts model with 552 billion backbone parameters and a one-million-token context. It activates 8 billion parameters while processing the initial prompt (prefill)…
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Part of a tracked trend
The Inference-Cost Efficiency Race
Techniques that cut tokens generated and KV-cache memory per query will keep compressing the marginal cost of serving reasoning models, making inference efficiency a recurring competitive axis alongside raw capability.
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