Chinese AI lab DeepSeek is preparing to launch its most powerful AI model yet. Experts believe that DeepSeek V4 will be released around mid-February 2026, offering users the best AI coding model and potentially outperforming OpenAI's GPT 5.2 and Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.5. But is this too optimistic?
Read on for everything we know so far about the upcoming release, who's behind it and where you'll be able to access the model once it's available.
If you’re wondering what DeepSeek is, here’s everything you need to know.
DeepSeek V4 is the first whole-numbered update from the Hangzhou-based AI company since DeepSeek V3 was released in December 2024. It is the latest flagship model, used by almost one million people per month on the official chatbot platform alone.
DeepSeek has built a reputation as a highly capable coding model optimised for reasoning and complex tasks. V4 continues this heritage — primarily a coding and programming model, it will likely excel in logic and practical work rather than AI writing.
Notably, V4 is a hybrid model that supports both reasoning and non-reasoning tasks, meaning the distinction between R1 and V3.X will be a thing of the past, and DeepSeek R2 likely isn’t coming at all.
With that in mind, what are the main DeepSeek 4 features?
Here’s a breakdown of the main features of the fourth generation of DeepSeek, based on the information we have so far from news and reliable rumours from industry experts:
Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (mHC): On 1 January 2026, DeepSeek published an article about a new training method in a research paper co-authored by founder Liang Wenfeng. In short, the new approach they developed changes the way information flows through the model's layers and enables better performance without incurring significant additional computational costs.
Engram Memory System: Published on 13 January 2026, this conditional memory technology enables the model to selectively retain and recall information based on context. In practice, this means that the model will consume context much more slowly and be much more accurate for longer when working with large documents, codebases or very long chats.
DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA): Enables context windows to exceed one million tokens — for context, Claude Opus 4.5 only has 200,000 tokens to work with. The size of the context window is one of the biggest limitations of modern AI, and one million is one of the largest we have seen so far.
Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) Architecture: Continuing from V3, the model uses a system where only a fraction of its total parameters activate per request, dramatically improving efficiency.
DeepSeek was founded in July 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, a 40-year-old entrepreneur who also co-founded the quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer.
Liang studied at Zhejiang University, earning degrees in electronic information engineering and communication engineering. In 2015, he co-founded High-Flyer with classmates. The hedge fund relies on AI and mathematical models for trading decisions and exceeded 100 billion yuan (roughly $14 billion) in assets by 2021.
DeepSeek operates as a subsidiary of High-Flyer, which remains its sole financial backer. Liang holds an 84% stake. The company takes an unusual hiring approach: recruiting primarily from Chinese universities, often bringing on recent graduates, and seeking talent from non-computer-science backgrounds including poetry and advanced mathematics.
Liang has stated that the company's goal isn't quick profits but advancing AI toward artificial general intelligence.
Here’s what we know so far.
According to internal benchmarks, V4 is highly competitive, if not the best. Sources who spoke to The Information said that V4 outperforms Claude and GPT models in some of DeepSeek's internal tests. However, as always, the results of internal tests should be treated with caution.
Read more about DeepSeek vs ChatGPT.
To become the best coding model, V4 would need to beat Claude Opus 4.5's current SWE-bench verified score of 80.9%. This benchmark uses real GitHub issues to evaluate coding performance.
It is important to note that internal tests are generally unreliable as companies tend to exaggerate their claims to generate hype, but DeepSeek does not typically engage in this practice. In fact, they tend to underplay releases, making them available with minimal marketing.
Similarly, when it was released, the R1 model matched OpenAI's GPT-3 on maths and reasoning benchmarks, despite reportedly costing just $6 million to develop versus potentially hundreds of millions for GPT-3. If there’s one company whose performance claims are trustworthy, it’s DeepSeek.
However, these claims have not yet been verified by independent testing, so treat them with caution.
DeepSeek is targeting a release around mid-February 2026, which is likely to coincide with the Lunar New Year celebrations on 17 February.
If true, this would be the same timing as that of the release of DeepSeek's R1 on 20 January 2025, just before China's week-long Lunar New Year holiday. This release triggered a $1 trillion sell-off in tech stocks, including $600 billion from Nvidia alone.
However, DeepSeek has declined to officially confirm the release date.
When V4 launches, you'll likely several access options.
Overchat AI is an all-in-one platform providing access to multiple AI models, including DeepSeek. You can currently access DeepSeek V3.2 online or via mobile apps for iOS and Android. A free tier is available, offering up to 50 messages per month, as well as flexible Pro plans for different users. You’ll be able to access DeepSeek 4 on Overchat AI as soon as it becomes available.
DeepSeek is expected to release V4 as an open-weight model under a permissive license. This means you can download model weights from Hugging Face, run locally using tools like Ollama or vLLM, self-host on cloud platforms, and fine-tune for specific use cases.
Here are some of the AI models that will likely compete with DeepSeek 4 in the benchmarks:
Yes — the chatbot interface will likely remain free. API access is pay-per-use but significantly cheaper than competitors. If released as open-source, you can run it locally for free as well.
Expected around February 17, 2026, coinciding with the Chinese Lunar New Year. The exact date hasn't been officially confirmed.
Yes! You might have heard that DeepSeek's app has been banned in some countries because of privacy concerns, but this decision is mostly political due to the company’s Chinese origin. DeepSeek is used by over 1 million people monthly, and many users say that it’s the best AI model available today.
DeepSeek V4, an upcoming open-source AI model developed by Chinese company DeepSeek, is set to be released in mid-February 2026. It is the next generation of DeepSeek models and features a hybrid architecture that combines reasoning and non-reasoning. It has a context window of up to 1 million tokens and a new training methodology that promises even greater efficiency and performance from a small, cost-efficient model. DeepSeek tends to play down its releases, so when the company says that the model will be efficient, it is highly likely that something groundbreaking is on the horizon.
