Hilarious sentence: "DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash-1017 is a minor update to DeepSeek-V4.1-Flash, delivering substantial improvements across reasoning, coding, agentic tasks, and visual benchmarks." (emphasis mine)
Deepseep-v4.1-Flash-1017 is a minor update. A major update is something like Deepseek-v5-Flash.
FWIW, GP didn't write "a bad copy" but "bad copy", referring to the marketing sentence quoted by OP, rather than the model that was just released (as I presume "a bad copy" sounds, maybe like it's called that because it's [again, presumably] distilled?). "Copy", especially in a marketing context, is a written message.
This is just my headcanon though.
An example when using a less frequent term actually reduces specificity.
Also, DS is an excellent model.
These are not mutually exclusive.
The CCP requires extensive certification for new major releases, to make sure a model doesn't do anything they don't want it to.
To get around this, Chinese labs only bump versions when they have to and usually claim it's a minor update.
Then on the other side, they're obviously trying to market to the tech crowd...
Would highly recommend it, it's IMO the only serious Western reporting about China.
as good as Gordon Chang.
The problem here is quite often brainwashed people never realize that they have been brainwashed. Sometimes they trust, promote or even defend the perpetrators. You have my deep sympathy on this matter.
There is no such thing as an unpoliticized publication, but one can still read, taking into account their biases. The point is to extract the information while discarding the ideological interpretation. In fact, this exercise is often easier when the ideological tilt is as obvious as the capitalist liberals from the Economist.
Forget about their predictions or their moralizing, but they have actual Chinese reporters talking to actual Chinese people on the ground instead of doing the usual Western thing of white MBAs treating China like some alien civilizational threat.
Western media doesn't have correct informtion source about China. This is because Western favors Web ecosystem and most inforamtion live in the Web, but in China everyone use Apps.