GoKawiil
Tech News
The Department of Homeland Security has directed federal civilian agencies to remove DeepSeek technology from their IT systems and barred any future purchases of the Chinese company's products or services. The order also covers products made by DeepSeek affiliates and third-party tools built using DeepSeek's implementations.
DeepSeek has released V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max), a multimodal model accepting text and image input and producing text output, with a 1 million token context window. The model scored 45 on the Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index, well above the comparable median of 19, while running at 230 tokens per second.
DeepSeek has introduced two new tools, a Search API and a Fetch API, giving developers programmatic access to live web content for AI agents and retrieval-augmented generation applications. The Search API returns structured results from DeepSeek's own search engine, while the Fetch API pulls a single webpage's content and converts it to Markdown; both use the same bearer-token authentication as DeepSeek's existing API and are priced at $0.75 per 1,000 successful requests.
DeepSeek has shipped V4.1 Flash 1017, dated October 17, 2026, as a snapshot of its V4.1 Flash model available via the deepseek-flash API. The sparse mixture-of-experts model uses a new Causal Encoder-Decoder architecture, activating 8B parameters on input and 16B on output from a 552B-parameter backbone, with native image understanding trained jointly with text from the start.
DeepSeek has launched V4.1-Flash-1017, a minor version update to its V4.1-Flash model that the company says improves reasoning, coding, agentic task handling, and visual benchmark scores compared to the prior version. The update also shortens task execution time and output length. DeepSeek is also releasing deepseek-recipe, a Rust-based toolkit with Python bindings for encoding prompts and parsing model outputs.
China has rapidly expanded its scientific output over the past five decades and is now positioned to lead global research and development, according to Nature's reporting. A growing number of China-trained AI graduates are choosing to remain in the country rather than move abroad, with Chinese researchers now dominating global AI-related publications and firms like DeepSeek and MoonshotAI demonstrating competitive AI capabilities.
A growing number of Chinese computer science graduates are opting to remain in China for AI research rather than pursue PhDs in the United States, as the capability gap between the two countries narrows. China now produces more AI researchers than the US, and firms like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI are building models that rival top US systems at much lower cost.
Axios reports that executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies are privately preparing for public and political fallout from a major AI-related disaster, with many insiders expecting such an event within six to 12 months, likely a cyberattack disrupting financial services, internet, power or water. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei has warned that AI agent swarms could cause 'hundreds of billions of dollars in damage,' while CrowdStrike has linked Chinese AI models and Anthropic's Claude Code to a real theft of South Korean bank data.
CrowdStrike reported that a Chinese-speaking hacker used the ARTEX AI penetration testing suite alongside Claude Code agents to attack major South Korean banks including Shinhan, KB Kookmin, and Hana, exposing customer personal and credit card data and causing outages at some institutions. Researchers found open directories containing Claude session histories and ARTEX configuration files that tied the attacker's infrastructure to the breaches and revealed identifying details from a résumé the attacker had generated with the same tools.
Mistral released Large 4, a trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts model, in a research preview this week, with full weights due at the end of October. Independent benchmarking firm Artificial Analysis scored it 38 on its Intelligence Index, making it the top model from outside the US and China, though several Chinese open models including DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and MiMo-V2.6-Pro scored as high or higher overall. Large 4 scored 50 on Artificial Analysis's Cyber Index, tying GLM-5.3-Flash, and hit 82% on the CyberGym-E2E-AA cybersecurity test, its best individual result.
A developer reverse-engineered the Nokia 110 4G's firmware to turn its Calculator app into a chat interface that connects to DeepSeek's chat API. The prototype lets users type messages on the number pad and have the AI agent control phone functions like checking battery level, toggling the torch, starting calls, and setting alarms. The app is loaded into RAM from a computer and currently must be reloaded after every restart or power-off since permanent installation isn't yet solved.
A developer reports using DeepSeek 4.1 Flash heavily across a dozen projects for about a month, saying it performs comparably to models like Opus in daily work and conversation without a noticeable quality gap. The model is paired with a $10/month OpenCode Go subscription, making usage effectively unlimited, with typical sessions costing under $1.