DeepSeek V4 Puts Frontier Performance on the Open-Source Price Floor

What V4's release establishes institutionally is that open-weight models have crossed from 'good enough for many tasks' to 'indistinguishable from frontier on the benchmarks procurement teams use.' A 1.6-trillion-parameter mixture-of-experts architecture with 49 billion active parameters per inference step and a 1-million-token context window gives enterprise buyers a self-hostable alternative that passes the same technical bar closed-source vendors have used to justify premium pricing. The consequence is not that closed-source labs will lose customers immediately — it is that their pricing rationale has been removed from under them, and the…