DeepSeek V4 Preview Drops, and It’s Already Taking Shots at OpenAI and Google

DeepSeek just dropped a preview of V4, its next-generation open-source model, and the company is making some bold claims. According to the announcement on Friday, V4 can go toe-to-toe with the best closed-source systems from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI. That’s a big statement, especially since DeepSeek has traditionally positioned itself as the scrappy open-source alternative to the US giants.

The biggest improvement? Coding. DeepSeek says V4 is a major leap forward in this area, which is the backbone of modern AI agents—think ChatGPT Codex or <a href="https://video.allwinchina.org/ai-tools/claude-code/" title="Claude Code review”>Claude Code. If V4 delivers on that promise, it could make open-source AI a serious contender for real-world dev work, not just academic experiments.

But there’s another angle here that’s getting less attention: hardware. DeepSeek explicitly calls out compatibility with Huawei’s domestic chips. That’s a strategic move, given the ongoing US export restrictions on advanced semiconductors to China. By optimizing for Huawei’s silicon, DeepSeek is signaling that Chinese AI doesn’t need Nvidia to compete. It’s a subtle but important flex for China’s semiconductor industry.

This release comes roughly a year after DeepSeek first rattled the US market with its earlier models. Back then, the surprise was that a Chinese company could produce competitive AI at all. Now, the question is whether V4 can sustain that momentum and actually win over developers who are used to the polish of paid APIs.

I’m curious to see independent benchmarks. DeepSeek’s own numbers look good on paper, but we’ve seen overhyped claims before. If V4 holds up in real-world coding tasks, it could be a genuine headache for OpenAI and Google. If not, it’s just another open-source model that’s good but not great.

Either way, this is a reminder that the AI race isn’t just about who has the most GPUs—it’s about who can ship a model that people actually want to use. DeepSeek is betting that open-source, with a focus on practical coding, is the way to win.

Read the full story at The Verge.