DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) vs Grok 4.7
Should you write with DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) or Grok 4.7? On this page the only thing that changes is the model. Both wrote their own version of the scripts behind 10 of my What's AI videos, five drafts per script, and four judges (three LLM judges from three model families plus Jev, a typed judge from TypeSafe) scored every draft blind, with my finished script as the reference. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) leads overall, 87.8 to 87.6. Their per-model Elo intervals overlap on this board. Heads-up: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) shares its model line with one of the four judges. The panel spans three LLM families plus Jev, a typed judge from TypeSafe, so no model here is scored by its own family alone (how the panel works).
The verdict
Close on the board and very different on the bill. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) is #27 and Grok 4.7 is #32, their Elo intervals overlap, and their overall scores are 0.1 apart. Grok is the slightly better writer on eight of the nine metrics, with Visual Cue Quality its clearest lead at about four points. DeepSeek wins it back on Length Adherence, by about twenty-one points. Then the price: DeepSeek costs about a cent a script against about twenty-seven cents, comes back in just over a minute instead of almost eight, and ships open weights. For most people that settles it.
Pick DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) for near-identical scores at a fraction of the cost, with open weights.
Pick Grok 4.7 when visual cues matter and you'll handle the length yourself.
How to read these numbers
Overall vs Elo. Overall is the weighted rubric score. Elo compares each model's five-draft average with every other model's, script by script, and counts gaps inside run-to-run noise as draws, so it rewards winning often and can disagree with overall.
Reading the Elo intervals. Each 95% range comes from resampling every model's recorded run scores on each task and re-ranking. Comparing these separate ranges does not test the Elo gap between two models: far apart is strong evidence, and overlap isn't a tie. The tasks stay fixed, so the ranges say nothing about new tasks (the long version).
Metric by metric: where the gap comes from
Blue is DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max), orange is Grok 4.7, and the solid bar takes the metric. The weight under each name is how much it counts toward the overall. Weighted by how much each metric counts, Length Adherence does the most to put DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) ahead: it leads there by 20.6 points. If you care about one thing, say voice or length, go straight to that row.
Cost, speed, and consistency
Quality is half the decision. The other half is what each script costs you, how long you wait, and how often you get a bad draft. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) is ahead and it's also the cheaper one: Grok 4.7 costs about 21x as much per script.
| DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) | Grok 4.7 | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall / 100 | 87.8 | 87.6 |
| Writing Elo | 2165 | 2143 |
| Score spread across drafts (± overall std) | 1.280 | 2.490 |
| Cost per script (USD) | 0.013 | 0.267 |
| Avg time per script (min) | 1.3 | 7.7 |
| Open weights | Yes | No |
Green wins the row, and for spread, cost and time, lower wins. Cost is one script at recorded list prices, uncached and without judging, so your real bill will differ. Spread is how much the overall score moves across a model's drafts, and time is the average time to get one accepted script, retries included.
Want the script-by-script detail? Full scorecards: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (max) · Grok 4.7. The whole scoring pipeline is on the methodology page.
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