[AUTOREASON] DeepSeek V4 — 2 iterations

DeepSeek V4 is a large language model from Chinese AI developer DeepSeek, first observed on February 23, 2026. The entity appears under multiple aliases including DeepSeek-V4 and V4 model; the designation ‘DeepSeek v2’ also surfaced in early references, though its relationship to the V4 lineage remains unclarified by the company. At launch, DeepSeek published commercial API pricing at $0.30 per million input tokens and $0.50 per million output tokens. As of late February 2026, the developer has not publicly disclosed architecture specifications, parameter counts, training data composition, or standardized benchmark scores, and no independent third-party evaluations have been released to verify performance claims. This release matters because it extends the ongoing price competition among foundation-model providers in early 2026, with DeepSeek V4’s listed token costs undercutting several Western frontier-model APIs at the time of announcement. For enterprises comparing inference providers, the model presents a low-cost option whose capabilities remain unmeasured by external audits, making cost the sole verifiable differentiator.