OG Deepseek Flash was pretty mediocre and then got a lot better with post training. The other thing they are fighting is most/all of the chinese labs are free to use/train on the 10B+ SOTA reasoning tokens they "stole" over the summer March-July 2026, if meta is playing by the rules, they are building this from the ground up. Getting anywhere near Deepseek Flash without that free training data is pretty impressive feat.