[::] Agentic Stacks

DeepSeek V4 vs Qwen 3 Max

Pick two tools from the same category to compare side-by-side.

DeepSeek V4
DeepSeek's V4 generation of open-weight MoE models with 1M-token context and agent-focused reasoning modes.
Qwen 3 Max
Alibaba's open-weights frontier model; very strong on Chinese + code.
Category modelmodel
Vendor type open sourceopen source
Pricing freefree
Strengths
  • + MIT-licensed open weights for both Pro and Flash variants
  • + 1M-token context window
  • + Selectable reasoning effort modes (non-think plus two thinking modes)
  • + Sparse MoE design keeps activated parameters low relative to total size
  • + Open weights
  • + Best-in-class for Chinese-language workloads
  • + Strong on coding benchmarks
Tradeoffs
  • − Branded as a preview release on deepseek.com as of June 2026
  • − V4-Pro's scale makes self-hosting impractical without large GPU clusters
  • − Inference infra is the team's problem
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