DeepSeek Flash really came at a bad time before the Anthropic IPO. I use this thing daily and it’s neck and neck with SOTA models. The search is one of the things setting it apart.
Is anyone actually oneshotting a whole app or even vibecoding one in multiple steps without it being "guided work"? I really wish announcements (like DeepSeek's recent one) would stop focusing on the ability of the model to spit out Minecraft clones on demand.
If Anthropic or OpenAI fails, the other wins the US market, no? I’m oversimplifying but…that’s a pretty realistic possibility in the face of people thinking sinking one US AI company would hurt the greater US venture into AI.
> If Anthropic or OpenAI fails, the other wins the US market, no?
I am of the opinion that they both either succeed or they both fail. They are both losing money hand over fist and their model quality is pretty close to each other. There is not a whole lot that sets them apart.
I agree on the analysis, but not on the conclusion. What makes you think that the conditions you describe are stable grounds for a duopoly where both could be successful at the same time?
If they did then Google would take over, and others would form from their competent engineers. Also, they don’t need to be profitable to succeed, they merely need to hype investors enough to ensure that their losses matter less than their growth projections.
They're about half a gen behind. Very impressive to get this kind of utility from a flash series model... the impact of RL seems to be behind much of the coding and agentic improvements lately.
About a year ago I built my own search and fetch MCP tools for agents based on third-party scraping providers. It is about 15-20x more cost-effective than what OpenAI and Anthropic is offering with their integrated web search and fetch tools. Very impressive that DeepSeek has such a competitive offering today.
How well does this (and similar services) deal with anti-bot protection? What happens if I attempt to retrieve a page protected by the cloudflare checkbox or by Anubis? An error, no useful content, or the actual content I want?
> Search API finds web pages for a query and returns structured results. It is powered by DeepSeek's in-house search engine.
Looks like they've built (or are building) their own index and return cached results. What you do with that information is up to you. If you want to visit the live page, you'd need to find a way around bot detection.
One reason (not the only one!) people use Anubis is to prevent the endless flood of requests from AI companies. If Deepseek scrapes once every few hours, that helps the website owner with the traffic problem while allowing access.
If they don't want to allow access, my guess is that deepseek's search crawler respects robots.txt but I don't know.
There is no single answer to this, it entirely depends on the exact service and the exact page
Most US services like Claude and ChatGPT send a specific user agent that makes it easy to block them and specifically does not try to get around any sort of bot protections
Meanwhile other services could use a variety of tactics such as simply setting a browser user agent and/or using random data center IPs or residential IPs, etc etc and then the blocking would just come down to whatever the individual page has configured which can actually be pretty hit or miss
I've spent a lot of time building datamint.xyz, and dealing with user agents, datacenter IPs, and VPNs gets pretty tricky. What works right now is a fork of the latest Firefox with anti-fingerprinting patches, paired with a high-quality residential proxy network with clean IPs. Even the basic setup needs 11+ code-level patches, and there are still a few edge cases, but this setup should cover 99% of cases.
Thank you for escalating the arms race that's currently destroying the internet. I can't look at the Apple user forums, my health insurance company's portal, pay my county taxes, browse Digikey and Mouser, view Github or whatever forge, etc. etc. without having to jump through Cloudflare or Anubis garbage designed to block your abusive behavior.
I'm just overflowing with joy that you're comfortable wasting my time and money.
Most of you local requests will fail (with Python/Curl/whatever) if you are not using a remote-controlled Firefox/Chrome. And even then you will be bitten brutally by captchas, rendering them basically unusable. So it's better to outsource your web search requests to an external service.
The existing search machines that offer free APIs for local harnesses are super bad with low quality.
For comparison, Kagi charges $12 per 1000 searches (only talking about their API pricing, like what you’d use with an LLM; their $10/mo plan has unlimited searches but it’s a TOS violation to use those credentials with an LLM).
DeepSeek Flash really came at a bad time before the Anthropic IPO. I use this thing daily and it’s neck and neck with SOTA models. The search is one of the things setting it apart.
Models are comming every 4-6 months. Anthropic, OpenAI, all of them know this.
It's absolutely not SOTA for vibe coding a whole app, but for guided work it is great.
Is anyone actually oneshotting a whole app or even vibecoding one in multiple steps without it being "guided work"? I really wish announcements (like DeepSeek's recent one) would stop focusing on the ability of the model to spit out Minecraft clones on demand.
[delayed]
Some people are trying to one shot entire companies
OP didn’t mention one-shotting.
There are plenty of use cases for the ability to quickly through together and refine an application without reviewing the code though.
which model is SOTA for vibe coding a whole app? I always use models+agents in guided setup
the moment there is a model which can code whole app, we can fairly say software engineering is done.
It's really not neck and neck with Opus 5.5.
Really depends on your use case.
You are right that there's plenty of use cases where Opus 5.5 is better.
If it depends on your use case then it’s not neck and neck…
> bad time
Regardless of the performance metrics... why bad time?
Deepseek is more like a pet project with huge state backing, and they don't seem to compete with Anthropic in terms of profitability.
Or at a really good time, depending on who you ask.
Not everyone wants Anthropic to succeed.
If Anthropic or OpenAI fails, the other wins the US market, no? I’m oversimplifying but…that’s a pretty realistic possibility in the face of people thinking sinking one US AI company would hurt the greater US venture into AI.
> If Anthropic or OpenAI fails, the other wins the US market, no?
I am of the opinion that they both either succeed or they both fail. They are both losing money hand over fist and their model quality is pretty close to each other. There is not a whole lot that sets them apart.
I agree on the analysis, but not on the conclusion. What makes you think that the conditions you describe are stable grounds for a duopoly where both could be successful at the same time?
No? Why would either of one of those have to win? Even if you limit yourself to US companies only, Google and Meta still exist.
What if both fail?
If they did then Google would take over, and others would form from their competent engineers. Also, they don’t need to be profitable to succeed, they merely need to hype investors enough to ensure that their losses matter less than their growth projections.
What if all of them fail because the capitalist model of centralization followed by rent-seeking gets foiled by an open alternative?
That is explicitly the Chinese strategy.
Now, what if the largest capitalist economy went all-in on an AI that might no longer be sufficiently monetizable?
i thought open models weren't SOTA. therefore not neck and neck... in your experience, do you think it depends on your type of work?
They're about half a gen behind. Very impressive to get this kind of utility from a flash series model... the impact of RL seems to be behind much of the coding and agentic improvements lately.
In my experience, for coding, they are pretty much SOTA. Maybe not for other sciences and problem solving.
It literally is not though... even DeepSeek doesn't claim that. It's just super cost-effective
About a year ago I built my own search and fetch MCP tools for agents based on third-party scraping providers. It is about 15-20x more cost-effective than what OpenAI and Anthropic is offering with their integrated web search and fetch tools. Very impressive that DeepSeek has such a competitive offering today.
For comparison that’s $5 with Brave Search API and $12 with Kagi API
$4 with Exa, $1.50 with SERP API
How well does this (and similar services) deal with anti-bot protection? What happens if I attempt to retrieve a page protected by the cloudflare checkbox or by Anubis? An error, no useful content, or the actual content I want?
> Search API finds web pages for a query and returns structured results. It is powered by DeepSeek's in-house search engine.
Looks like they've built (or are building) their own index and return cached results. What you do with that information is up to you. If you want to visit the live page, you'd need to find a way around bot detection.
One reason (not the only one!) people use Anubis is to prevent the endless flood of requests from AI companies. If Deepseek scrapes once every few hours, that helps the website owner with the traffic problem while allowing access.
If they don't want to allow access, my guess is that deepseek's search crawler respects robots.txt but I don't know.
There is no single answer to this, it entirely depends on the exact service and the exact page
Most US services like Claude and ChatGPT send a specific user agent that makes it easy to block them and specifically does not try to get around any sort of bot protections
Meanwhile other services could use a variety of tactics such as simply setting a browser user agent and/or using random data center IPs or residential IPs, etc etc and then the blocking would just come down to whatever the individual page has configured which can actually be pretty hit or miss
I've spent a lot of time building datamint.xyz, and dealing with user agents, datacenter IPs, and VPNs gets pretty tricky. What works right now is a fork of the latest Firefox with anti-fingerprinting patches, paired with a high-quality residential proxy network with clean IPs. Even the basic setup needs 11+ code-level patches, and there are still a few edge cases, but this setup should cover 99% of cases.
Thank you for escalating the arms race that's currently destroying the internet. I can't look at the Apple user forums, my health insurance company's portal, pay my county taxes, browse Digikey and Mouser, view Github or whatever forge, etc. etc. without having to jump through Cloudflare or Anubis garbage designed to block your abusive behavior.
I'm just overflowing with joy that you're comfortable wasting my time and money.
I have to agree with the (sarcastic) sibling comment. You’re essentially making everyone’s life worse in the name of personal profit.
Please stop. The last thing we need in the world is more greed and selfishness.
you can bypass those easily except Google Captcha v3, you need to have your own proxy swarm to make it at scale.
Can someone explain why fetch costs money. I thought it was your locally-running harness doing it. How can they charge you for that?
Most of you local requests will fail (with Python/Curl/whatever) if you are not using a remote-controlled Firefox/Chrome. And even then you will be bitten brutally by captchas, rendering them basically unusable. So it's better to outsource your web search requests to an external service.
The existing search machines that offer free APIs for local harnesses are super bad with low quality.
For comparison, Kagi charges $12 per 1000 searches (only talking about their API pricing, like what you’d use with an LLM; their $10/mo plan has unlimited searches but it’s a TOS violation to use those credentials with an LLM).
>it’s a TOS violation
Competitor uruky is more relaxed about api and is cheaper. Creator is active on hn
https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=BrunoBernardino
These prices will skyrocket eventually. AI companies need more money.
RAM prices will also probably stay very high as long as AI companis act in such a parasitic manner.
As reference point exa charges 4 bucks