An open 1.6T model puts China four to five months behind the frontier

Claim

DeepSeek answered with a 1.6-trillion-parameter open-weight model with a million-token context claiming state of the art on agentic coding, landing in territory the frontier occupied months earlier and keeping China roughly four to five months behind while well ahead of every other domestic lab.

Reported metric: 1.6T / 4-5 months

Reporting date: 2026-04-26 (not necessarily the event date)

Sources

Attribution and reporting linked by this record; links do not imply independent verification.

• Welcome to April 26, 2026 (theinnermostloop.substack.com)