I understand why you might think so, as calling it v4.1 does imply that, but no, 4.1 was built from scratch.
Different architecture, v4 is text-only while v4.1 is multimodal and so on.
Different architecture, v4 is text-only while v4.1 is multimodal and so on.
To be a pedant, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp was a further checkpoint of the V4.0 lineage that supported image input. It lost a few benchmark points compared to the previous 0731 checkpoint so a lot of people skipped it. Completely unrelated to V4.1 though.
I wish labs used more reasonable naming schemes.