DeepSeek V4 Countdown - Weekly Update (Jan 25, 2026): Specs Leak, Release Date, and Reddit Rumors

With the 2026 Lunar New Year approaching, the global AI community's eyes are locked on DeepSeek. Following the industry-shaking R1 model, can DeepSeek V4 once again disrupt the market's pricing power and performance ceiling?

We have compiled all core information from GitHub repositories, academic papers, Reddit communities, and developer speculations to bring you the most comprehensive V4 release preview.

1. Release Date: Why March 17, 2026?

The most widely accepted release window currently is March 17, 2026 (Lunar New Year's Day).

• Historical Pattern: DeepSeek has a tradition of releasing major updates during the Lunar New Year (like last year's R1).
• Leak Clues: Multiple developer communities and Twitter tech influencers have pointed out that DeepSeek's server clusters have recently been in a full-load inference testing state, which is a typical sign 3-4 weeks before a launch.

2. Core Specs Leaked: "MODEL1" Technical Details

Based on code updates in the GitHub deepseek-v3 repository and related projects on January 20, we identified the following technical parameters:

• Architecture Upgrade: V4 will highly likely continue the Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture, but total parameters may exceed 800B, while active parameters will be optimized to be lower to maintain extreme inference speed. See DeepSeek V4 Model1 Github Reveal.
• FlashMLA Optimization: The official team recently open-sourced FlashMLA, specifically optimizing Multi-Head Latent Attention for Hopper architecture (H100/H800), meaning V4's inference costs will drop further.
• Engram Memory Mechanism: Combining DeepSeek's latest research papers, V4 may introduce "Bio-inspired Conditional Memory," supporting a context window of up to 1M+ without the "amnesia" phenomenon at the end of long texts seen in traditional models. Read more about Engram Memory Mechanism.

3. Reddit Community Buzz: What are Global Users Watching?

In r/DeepSeek and r/LocalLLaMA channels, discussions about V4 are exploding. Core viewpoints include:

• "Alternative to o1": Reddit users generally expect V4 to rival OpenAI's o1 and o3 in "Silent Reasoning."
• Local Deployment Threshold: Hardware enthusiasts are most concerned about Quantized versions of V4. People are predicting whether 4x RTX 5090s can run the medium-parameter version of V4. Check out the DeepSeek V4 Local Deployment Guide.
• Coding Capabilities: "DeepSeek has always rivaled Claude 3.5 Sonnet in coding. V4 might score over 90% on HumanEval." — A top-voted Reddit comment.

4. Performance Prediction: V4 vs GPT-5 / Claude 4.5

Based on current leaks, we predict V4's performance (for detailed comparisons, see DeepSeek V4 Benchmarks):

• Math & Reasoning: Will significantly lead V3, with expected AIME scores improving by over 15%.
• API Pricing: Expected to remain the lowest in the industry, possibly introducing an even more aggressive "cents per million tokens" strategy, effectively ending the era of expensive closed-source models. For more info, see the DeepSeek V4 API Guide.

5. How to Get the Release Notification First?

DeepSeek often chooses to surprise release directly on their official website www.deepseek.com and GitHub late at night or early morning.

• Bookmark Us: We will monitor DeepSeek's GitHub activity in real-time.
• Watch for Keywords: Keep an eye out for terms like MODEL1 or DeepSeek-V4-Preview.