GPT-5.6 Sol (high) vs DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max)
Should you write with GPT-5.6 Sol (high) or DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max)? 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 three judges from three model families scored every draft blind, with my finished script as the reference. GPT-5.6 Sol (high) leads overall, 87.6 to 84.8. Heads-up: GPT-5.6 Sol (high) shares its model line with one of the three judges. The panel spans three model families, so no model here is scored by its own family alone (how the panel works).
The verdict
GPT-5.6 Sol (high) is the better writer: #33 against #56, and DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) doesn't win a single metric. The biggest gaps are the clean-up metrics, more than seven points on Visual Cue Quality plus a clear lead on slop, so GPT-5.6 Sol (high) scripts need less tidying. It's also more than twice as fast. What you give up is price and control. DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) costs $0.021 per script against $0.155, about seven times cheaper, and publishes open weights. If you're batch-generating scripts you'll edit by hand anyway, that's a big saving for a moderate quality drop.
Pick GPT-5.6 Sol (high) for cleaner, faster scripts that need less editing.
Pick DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) for open weights and a much lower bill on scripts you'll edit anyway.
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. My own scripts score 90.9 on the same rubric, not a literal 100. Right now 2 of 167 ranked configurations reach it. A model above that line writes at that level on this rubric. That's not the same as beating my script line for line.
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 GPT-5.6 Sol (high), orange is DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max), 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, Continuity & Emotion does the most to put GPT-5.6 Sol (high) ahead: it leads there by 4.0 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. The lead has a price: GPT-5.6 Sol (high) costs about 7.4x as much per script as DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max).
| GPT-5.6 Sol (high) | DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max) | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall / 100 | 87.6 | 84.8 |
| Writing Elo | 2134 | 1917 |
| Score spread across drafts (± overall std) | 1.330 | 4.040 |
| Cost per script (USD) | 0.155 | 0.021 |
| Avg time per script (min) | 1.4 | 3.2 |
| Open weights | No | Yes |
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: GPT-5.6 Sol (high) · DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 (max). The whole scoring pipeline is on the methodology page.
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