In short
How they differ.
Worked out from the figures below. Prices and specs are the makers' own, read Oct 20, 2026.
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is cheaper per output token: $1.20 against $10 per million tokens, so Gemini 4 Argon costs 8.3 times as much.
- Gemini 4 Argon reads more at once: a context window of 1M tokens against 1M.
- DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 can be downloaded and run on your own machine; Gemini 4 Argon can't.
- On the 3 independent boards that rank both, Gemini 4 Argon places higher on 3 and DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 on 0.
Side by side
The specs.
| DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | Gemini 4 Argon | |
|---|---|---|
| Made by | DeepSeek · China | Google · US |
| Released | Oct 17, 2026 | Sep 30, 2026 |
| Price per 1M tokens | $0.30 in / $1.20 out (peak-hours price) | $2 in / $10 out (introductory price) |
| Context window | 1M | 1M |
| Takes in | text, image | text, image, video, audio, pdf |
| Download and run it yourself | Yes (MIT) | No |
| Size | 552B backbone parameters parameters, 8B per token during prefill, 16B during decode active | Not published |
| Maker says | “Stronger benchmark performance, faster task completion, and shorter outputs than the previous version.” | “Our flagship reasoning model with a unified 1M context window and long decodes up to 1M tokens.” |
| Sources | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description | Prices, Oct 20, 2026 · Description |
Independent tests
Where they place.
Position on each board we follow (1 is best). Epoch AI's and Vectara's scores are shown; the other boards are linked for their own figures.
| Board | DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 | Gemini 4 Argon |
|---|---|---|
| Epoch Capabilities IndexEpoch AI, Oct 20, 2026 | Not listed | #5164.56 |
| LMArena textLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | Not listed | #1 |
| LMArena creative writingLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | Not listed | #2 |
| LMArena coding chatsLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | Not listed | #1 |
| LMArena WebDevLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | Not listed | #10 |
| LMArena mathLMArena, Oct 15, 2026 | Not listed | #1 |
| LMArena Agent ArenaLMArena, Oct 19, 2026 | Not listed | #6 |
| Humanity's Last ExamScale AI | Not listed | #3 |
| SWE-Bench ProScale AI, Sep 22, 2026 | Not listed | #2 |
| Vals IndexVals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #8 | #3 |
| Terminal-Bench 4.0Vals AI, Oct 19, 2026 | #17 | #6 |
| Vibe Code BenchVals AI, Oct 18, 2026 | #11 | #2 |
| ProofBenchVals AI, Oct 12, 2026 | Not listed | #7 |
| CUA-bench (games)Vals AI, Oct 13, 2026 | Not listed | #8 |
| Vectara hallucination testVectara, Oct 16, 2026 | Not listed | #8312.1% |
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