01What DeepSeek v4 Is and How It Works

DeepSeek v4 is a free, open AI model from a small team in China that almost matches paid models like Claude on coding tests. It came out on April 24, 2026, and you can use it on their site or run it yourself for nothing.

There are two versions. The big one is v4 Pro with 1.6 trillion total parameters, but only 49 billion active at any time. The smaller one is v4 Flash with 284 billion parameters and 13 billion active.

Both use a trick called mixture of experts, so the model is huge but cheap to run because most of it sleeps until needed.

Both versions have a 1 million token memory, which is about 750,000 words. You can drop a whole book or your full website into it, and it keeps track of everything. And both are free under the MIT license, so you can use them in your business with no restrictions.

02Main Features and What's New in DeepSeek v4

DeepSeek v4 Pro was built for agent work, meaning it can do jobs by itself. It runs commands, checks its own work, and fixes mistakes. This is the first free model that handles hundreds of steps without breaking, unlike others that snap after 10 or 20 steps.

Another big feature is compressed sparse attention. Instead of reading every word of a long document over and over, it builds a smart index of important parts. At 1 million tokens, v4 Pro uses about 27% of the brainpower that v3.2 needed and just 10% of the memory cache.

This means you can give it your entire business in one go, like emails, blog posts, customer chat history, and product catalog, and it won't forget the start. That's a huge deal for real work, not just chatting.

03How to Set Up DeepSeek v4

Getting started with DeepSeek v4 is easy. Here are the steps:

  1. Go to chat.deepseek.com to chat free.
  2. Choose Expert mode for the Pro version or Instant mode for Flash.
  3. If you want to plug it into your own apps, use the API, which is live.
  4. To run it on your own machine, download the model weights from Hugging Face.
  5. You can also run it on a cloud service that hosts it on fast chips for quick results.

For the Claude Code setup, there's an open source tool called free cloud code by Ali Shera. Install it in about 15 minutes. Then your Claude Code window looks the same, but every prompt goes to DeepSeek v4 Flash instead.

04How to Use DeepSeek v4 for Business Tasks

You can use DeepSeek v4 for a variety of daily jobs. For example, set it up as a free coding helper. It can write sales follow-up emails for you.

Point it at your website to find and fix issues while you sleep.

The agent capability lets it chain tools together. An agent can search the web, click into a page, pull data, run a script, save a file, send a message, and check the result, all in one flow. This works across hundreds of steps without forgetting.

For business owners, this means you can hand it a goal, watch it work, and fix it when it breaks. You can use it to handle leads, build sites, automate emails, and grow your client list.

05Test Results and Comparisons from the Episode

On real coding tests, DeepSeek v4 Pro scored 80.6% on SREBench Verified, while Claude Opus 4.6 got 80.8%. That's only 0.2% apart. On TerminalBench 2.0, a test of running commands and fixing things, v4 Pro hit 67.9%, beating Claude's 65.4%.

On Codeforces, the hardest coding contest, v4 Pro scored 3,206, the highest any AI has hit. On LiveCodeBench, it scored 93.5%. On HumanEval, it got about 96%.

But not everything is perfect. On SWE-Bench Pro, v4 Pro scored about 55%, while Claude Opus 4.7 got 64.3%. On the HMMT 2026 math test, Claude hit 96.2%, GPT 5.4 hit 97.7%, and DeepSeek got 95.2%.

So for the hardest tasks, Claude and GPT still lead by a bit.

06Tips, Limits, and Mistakes to Avoid

DeepSeek v4 is not the best at everything. It's three to six months behind the top models on very hard problems. But for most daily tasks, it's 95% as good for less than 10% of the price.

One mistake is thinking you should cancel your Claude or GPT plan. The smart play is to use both. Use Claude or GPT for high-stakes thinking and DeepSeek for bulk work, big context, and agent loops.

There's a pattern called the orchestrator setup. Use a smart model to plan and review, then let DeepSeek do all the typing. Anthropic tested this and got better results than one model doing everything.

Also, don't wait for AI to settle down. The gap between free and paid is closing fast. Learn the skill of using AI now, because the tools change every few months.

07Who Should Use DeepSeek v4 and Why It Matters

DeepSeek v4 is for business owners who want to do real work with AI without paying high costs. If you need to handle a lot of data, run agent tasks, or automate emails, this free model can do it.

It matters because a year ago, no one expected a free open model to tie with top paid models. It took only 15 months. This trend speeds up, so the people who learn AI now will have a big advantage.

If you're on the fence, know that early users of Claude Code are now using DeepSeek v4 for almost nothing. The skill of plugging AI into a business wins every cycle. Don't miss out.