DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) vs Gemini 4 Carbon (Low)

Which is better for the money: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) by DeepSeek or Gemini 4 Carbon (Low) by Google? Intelligence, total benchmark cost, and end-to-end time from Artificial Analysis & other sources, snapshot 2026-11-04.

Trade-off

DeepSeekDeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max)On the open-weights frontier

Intelligence: 32.60
Total cost: $521

GoogleGemini 4 Carbon (Low)Off the frontier

Intelligence: 54.20
Total cost: $5725

Verdict

Depends on your budget

Gemini 4 Carbon (Low) scores 21.6 points higher (54.2 vs 32.6) but costs 11× as much to run the benchmark ($5725 vs $521; flagship vs premium cost classes). They are not alternatives at one budget: pick Gemini 4 Carbon (Low) when you need intelligence above 32.6, and DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max) when 32.6 is enough.

Metric	DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max)	Gemini 4 Carbon (Low)	Difference
Intelligence (higher is better)	32.6	54.2	+66.3% Gemini 4 Carbon (Low) is 66.3% more intelligent
Total AA cost (lower is better)	$520.63	$5,725.02	+999.6% Gemini 4 Carbon (Low) is 11× more expensive
End-to-end time (lower is better)	16.42s	16.28s	−0.9% Gemini 4 Carbon (Low) is 0.9% faster
Price per 1M tokens (in / out)	$0.30 / $1.20	$4.00 / $20.0
Input modalities	Text, Image	Text, Image, Speech, Video

Gemini 4 Carbon (Low) vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max): 66.3% more intelligence, 999.6% more cost to run the AA benchmark, and 0.9% faster end-to-end.

Open this matchup in the interactive picker DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 (Max): what beats it Gemini 4 Carbon (Low): what beats it

Matchup

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Agents: Accept: text/markdown or ?format=md returns this page as Markdown. JSON: /api/v1/compare/deepseek-v4-1-flash-1017/gemini-4-carbon-low · Markdown: /api/v1/compare/deepseek-v4-1-flash-1017/gemini-4-carbon-low?format=md · llms.txt · agent skill

Depends on your budget

Against the frontier

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