The DeepSeek V4‑Flash model has entered public beta, delivering benchmark scores that surpass its V4‑Pro‑Preview predecessor and approach Opus 4.8, while costing only about 1/90 of Claude, and now supports the Responses API and Codex optimizations.
SpaceXAI's Grok 4.5 arrives ahead of OpenAI's GPT‑5.6 Sol, delivering terminal‑bench scores of 83.3% and multilingual code‑fixing at 78.0%, while offering a striking $2/$6 per‑million‑token price and 80 TPS inference speed, yet still lagging behind top rivals on the hardest SWE‑Bench Pro tasks.
With a growing array of overseas and domestic LLM APIs in 2024, this guide explains how to pick the right model—starting with a top‑tier option like GPT‑4o for feasibility testing, then moving to cost‑effective or Chinese alternatives, while weighing price, inference speed, context window, API compatibility, and rate limits.
