DeepSeek V3.1 vs GPT-5.4

We compare the 12-test suite results from our testing. Wins, ties, and ranks below refer to our tests and the published model rankings in the payload. - Safety calibration: GPT-5.4 5 vs DeepSeek V3.1 1 — GPT-5.4 wins and is tied for 1st of 55 models (tied with 4 others); DeepSeek ranks 32 of 55. This matters for refusing harmful requests and correct allow/deny decisions. - Tool calling: GPT-5.4 4 vs DeepSeek 3 — GPT-5.4 wins and ranks 18 of 54; DeepSeek ranks 47 of 54. Expect more accurate function selection and argument sequencing with GPT-5.4 in agentic tool workflows. - Agentic planning: GPT-5.4 5 vs DeepSeek 4 — GPT-5.4 tied for 1st of 54; better at goal decomposition and recovery. - Strategic analysis: GPT-5.4 5 vs DeepSeek 4 — GPT-5.4 wins and is tied for 1st (tradeoff reasoning with numbers). - Constrained rewriting: GPT-5.4 4 vs DeepSeek 3 — GPT-5.4 wins (rank 6 of 53) so it better compresses content under tight limits. - Multilingual: GPT-5.4 5 vs DeepSeek 4 — GPT-5.4 tied for 1st of 55, so higher non-English parity. - Creative problem solving: DeepSeek V3.1 5 vs GPT-5.4 4 — DeepSeek wins and is tied for 1st on this test in our suite; expect more non-obvious, feasible idea generation. - Ties (no clear advantage): structured_output (both 5, both tied for 1st), faithfulness (both 5, both tied for 1st), long_context (both 5, both tied for 1st), persona_consistency (both 5). - Classification: both scored 3 and tie. Practical meaning: GPT-5.4 dominates safety, tool-driven orchestration, planning, multilingual and math/coding external benchmarks, while DeepSeek is markedly cheaper and slightly stronger at creative problem solving. Supplementary external benchmarks: on SWE-bench Verified (Epoch AI), GPT-5.4 scores 76.9% (rank 2 of 12, Epoch AI); on AIME 2025 (Epoch AI) GPT-5.4 scores 95.3% (rank 3 of 23, Epoch AI). DeepSeek has no external scores in the payload to compare.

Pricing (per million tokens): DeepSeek V3.1 charges $0.15 input and $0.75 output; GPT-5.4 charges $2.50 input and $15.00 output. If you run a 1M input + 1M output tokens/month workload, DeepSeek costs $0.90/month vs GPT-5.4 $17.50/month. At 10M in+10M out: DeepSeek $9.00 vs GPT-5.4 $175.00. At 100M in+100M out: DeepSeek $90.00 vs GPT-5.4 $1,750.00. That gap matters for high-volume apps (SaaS, content platforms, chatbots) where GPT-5.4 adds hundreds to thousands of dollars per month versus DeepSeek; cost-sensitive teams or startups should prioritize DeepSeek, while teams that need GPT-5.4’s higher safety and tool capabilities should budget for the premium.

Choose DeepSeek V3.1 if you need the lowest per-token cost (input $0.15 / output $0.75 per M), top-tier creative problem solving, and strong structured-output and faithfulness at large context lengths. Choose GPT-5.4 if you require rigorous safety calibration (5 vs 1), stronger tool-calling and agentic planning (4→5), better constrained rewriting, multilingual parity, and superior external coding/math performance (SWE-bench 76.9% and AIME 95.3% per Epoch AI) and can absorb the higher cost ($2.50/$15 per M).