Weekly Roundup: The Week DeepSeek V4 Became "Real"

Week of Jan 26 - Feb 01, 2026

This week has been explosive for the open-source AI community. From release date confirmations to architectural leaks, the picture of DeepSeek V4 is finally becoming clear.

Here is your executive summary of everything that happened.

1. The "Thinking Process" Leak (Feb 01)

The biggest story of the week dropped just hours ago. Leaked UI concepts suggest V4 will feature a "Visual Chain of Thought" interface, allowing users to see the model's reasoning as a branching tree.

👉 Read the full report

2. Release Date Target: Mid-March (Jan 30)

Multiple sources, including The Information, have pinpointed Mid-March 2026 (Next Week) as the launch window. This aligns with DeepSeek's historical pattern of holiday releases.

👉 Read the analysis

3. V4 vs. GPT-5: The Coding Benchmark (Jan 30)

Leaked internal benchmarks show V4 scoring 96.5% on HumanEval+, potentially edging out GPT-5 in pure coding tasks. The community is calling it the "Coding Monster."

👉 See the benchmarks

4. Industry Moves: Baidu Strikes Back (Jan 29)

While DeepSeek grabs headlines, Baidu quietly released PaddleOCR-VL-1.5, claiming superior performance in document parsing. The Chinese AI arms race is heating up.

👉 Read about the OCR war

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What to Expect Next Week?

• Official Teasers: We expect DeepSeek's official Twitter to break silence soon.
• Paper Drop: A technical paper on the "Engram" architecture might drop before the model weights.

Stay tuned. We are tracking the GitHub commit logs 24/7.