Willison Finds Something New in DeepSeek V4 Pro: Its Low/Medium/High Reasoning Levels Draw Visibly Different Pictures
simonwillison.net·medium signal
Testing the new DeepSeek Pro model on his pelican-on-a-bicycle SVG benchmark, Willison notes the three reasoning-effort settings produce markedly different visual output — a divergence he says he has not seen from other models with configurable effort. He also flags the provenance chain as unusual: the benchmark numbers surfaced first in DeepSeek's WeChat group before reaching Reddit and Hacker News, with no conventional model card release.