1.6 Trillion Parameters Just Went Open Source. What About the Other Direction?

On April 27, DeepSeek released its V4 model family and open-sourced the weights. The flagship V4-Pro Base has 1.6 trillion parameters (862B active), while V4-Flash comes in at 158B (Base 292B). Both use a Mixture of Experts (MoE) architecture. Within 48 hours of landing on HuggingFace, V4-Pro had already racked up 3,000+ likes and 174K downloads. It's an impressive milestone for open-source AI. But it also crystallizes a question that's been brewing for a while: Is "bigger" the only direction AI