The DeepSeek V4 'Leak' Was Fake. But the Real Model May Be Bigger Than Anyone Expected.

A post on r/LocalLLaMA claiming a DeepSeek employee had teased a "massive" new model surpassing all existing benchmarks racked up 305 upvotes before anyone checked. Then someone did: the leak was confirmed as a fabrication. The post was deleted. The hype lingered.

What's Actually Happening

The fake tapped into real anticipation. DeepSeek V4 is genuinely in development — Reuters, Financial Times, and Chinese tech media have reported on it independently. What's known so far paints a picture of something ambitious.

V4 is expected to reach roughly 1 trillion total parameters in a mixture-of-experts architecture, with approximately 37 billion active per token — a significant jump from V3's 671 billion total. The context window reportedly extends to 1 million tokens, up from 128K. And unlike previous versions, V4 is designed as natively multimodal from the ground up — text, image, and video.

The most interesting technical detail is Engram, a conditional memory architecture spotted in recent research papers. It offloads static knowledge from GPU to CPU memory via scalable lookup, potentially solving one of the core efficiency problems in running trillion-parameter models without proportional speed loss.

The Delays

V4 has missed multiple release windows. It was originally expected in February, then late February, then early March. Chinese media now suggests April 2026. According to Financial Times, part of the delay came from training attempts on Huawei Ascend chips that hit stability problems, forcing a revert to NVIDIA hardware for training while relegating Chinese chips to inference only.

CEO Liang Wenfeng has reportedly been dissatisfied with earlier V4 results, causing repeated delays. DeepSeek R2, the reasoning model successor to R1, is on a separate track with a potential April release as well.

Why It Matters

In the context of China's open-source AI strategy, V4 represents the next test of whether Chinese labs can keep pace with — or surpass — Western frontier models. Z.ai co-founder Tang Jie said on X that V4 "will likely outperform all existing Chinese open-source LLMs." Whether it matches GPT-5.4 or Claude Opus 4.6 remains to be seen.

The fake leak was a reminder that the AI community's appetite for DeepSeek news currently outpaces the company's actual output. When V4 does ship, the hype will need to compete with reality — and after the disruption DeepSeek caused in early 2025, expectations are sky-high.