China strategist. Author of bi-weekly China Macro Watch. Mission: bridge the information gap between the East and the West.
Contact: shanghaimacro@gmail.com
Prediction: Deepseek v4 flash will take over Claude as the no.1 winner in market share. It's the biggest story of 2026! Three reasons:
1. It's so cheap. 100x cheaper in unit token pricing.
2. It's so fast. Much much faster than Claude. My vibe check is around 2-3x faster.
3. It's so cache-efficient: most of my tokens spent are in cache read, and cache input pricing are $0.5/Mt Opus 5 v.s. $0.0028/Mt Deepseek.
Deepseek has a much higher cache hit rate, which means the overall effective cost per task could be upwards of 500x cheaper.
For something that's 500x cheaper AND 2-3x faster per task, why wouldn't Deepseek V4 Flash win.