DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale vs GPT-4.1 nano

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale

DeepSeek

DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale is a high-compute variant of DeepSeek-V3.2 with 685 billion total parameters, made available for a limited period in December 2025. It was released without tool-calling support but demonstrated exceptional reasoning performance, achieving gold-medal results in the 2025 IMO and IOI competitions. DeepSeek-V3.2-Speciale targets research and benchmarking use cases requiring maximum reasoning capability under an MIT license.

GPT-4.1 nano

OpenAI

GPT-4.1 nano is OpenAI's smallest member of the GPT-4.1 family, released in April 2025 alongside GPT-4.1 and GPT-4.1 mini as the latency-optimized, cost-minimized option for high-throughput applications. Positioned below GPT-4.1 mini in both size and cost, it was designed for use cases where speed and affordability dominate over raw capability — including tool calling, intent classification, short-form instruction following, and retrieval-augmented lookup tasks. Unlike its larger siblings, it supports fine-tuning, making it a practical candidate for task-specific customization at scale without incurring the cost of fine-tuning larger models.