DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) vs GPT-5.5: pricing, Quality, Value, and benchmarks

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Pricing, app access, and Conversation Value

• Humanity's Last Exam

  Normalized quality input

  33.5%

  Artificial Analysis - Humanity's Last Exam evaluation | Third-party benchmark evaluation page used only after the official HLE leaderboard sources fail to yield a usable result.

• SWE-Bench Pro

  Software engineering task resolution

  55.4%

  BenchLM AI coding leaderboard | Third-party coding leaderboard with exact model rows for SWE-Bench Pro and companion coding benchmarks.

• GPQA Diamond

  Pass@1

  90.1%

  NVIDIA DeepSeek V4 Pro model card | NVIDIA-hosted model card row for DeepSeek V4 Pro Max; use as sourced provisional benchmark evidence. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row.

• Terminal-Bench 2.0

  Agentic terminal task completion

  67.9%

  NVIDIA DeepSeek V4 Pro model card | NVIDIA-hosted model card row for DeepSeek V4 Pro Max; display as companion agentic coding evidence. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row. Retained from the previous published snapshot because the current live source did not expose this benchmark row.

• Humanity's Last Exam

  Normalized quality input

  41.4%

  OpenAI GPT-5.5 announcement | Vendor-reported OpenAI GPT-5.5 HLE no-tools score. Do not use tools-enabled HLE for the primary reasoning leaderboard.

• SWE-Bench Pro

  Software engineering task resolution

  58.6%

  OpenAI GPT-5.5 announcement | OpenAI official launch and system-card materials. Results are vendor-reported and may use model-specific harness settings that must be compared cautiously.

• GPQA Diamond

  Normalized quality input

  93.6%

  OpenAI GPT-5.5 announcement | OpenAI official launch and system-card materials. Results are vendor-reported and may use model-specific harness settings that must be compared cautiously.

• ARC-AGI-2

  Novel pattern reasoning

  85.0%

  OpenAI GPT-5.5 announcement | ARC-AGI-2 is shown as supplementary evidence only and is not currently included in the PickAI Quality Score.

A cost-efficient frontier challenger for buyers who want strong reasoning, long-context work, and coding evidence without paying Western flagship economics.

Released April 2026, DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) is a serious cost-efficiency challenger for buyers who care about frontier intelligence without frontier infrastructure costs. It competes with leading Western frontier models on complex reasoning, document analysis, and sustained multi-step work, while appearing to require far fewer processing resources for the level of capability delivered. Its strengths are broad versatility: long-context work that stays coherent, useful creative writing, strong coding benchmark evidence, and interactions that feel more thoughtful than formulaic. The caveats are still real: Western models may retain an edge on some narrow coding benchmarks, deeper web-search integration, and enterprise ecosystem maturity, and the low unit cost can encourage enough usage that teams should still watch total volume. Bottom line: DeepSeek V4 Pro (Max) is frontier-level capability at unusually aggressive economics. If you want one of the smartest models your money can buy, it belongs high on the shortlist.

This model is still under editorial review. We will publish a verdict as soon as we have completed our review of the AI model.

OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 is the best all-round AI subscription for buyers who want one powerful assistant that can do far more than answer questions. It combines polished writing, sharp research, coding help, data analysis, document creation, tool use, and superb built-in image generation inside one familiar workspace. Its biggest upgrade over GPT-5.4 is follow-through: it is better at taking messy, multi-step requests and turning them into finished work with less hand-holding. For non-technical users who want the most complete, capable, and easy-to-live-with AI experience, GPT-5.5 is the safest premium choice. GPT-5.5 sits inside the best complete AI workspace: writing, research, coding help, data analysis, documents, spreadsheets, tool use, and now very strong built-in image generation. OpenAI’s own release notes describe GPT-5.5 as built to understand complex goals, use tools, check its work, and carry multi-step tasks through to completion. ChatGPT Images 2.0 also adds stronger image generation, better text rendering, multilingual support, flexible visual styles, and more advanced creative control.