Naive-N0.5 vs MiMo-V2.6 vs DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs GLM (2026)
The short answer
Four open-weight-class “flash” MoE models with 1M-token context shipped within seven days in September 2026, and they differ on price structure, modality and whether you can actually download them. Naive-N0.5-Flash (September 27) is cheapest on input at $0.10/MTok and has no full-attention layers. MiMo-V2.6-Flash (September 21) is cheapest on output at $0.28/MTok and is natively multimodal. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash (September 10) is the biggest at 552B, has 384K max output and the only Artificial Analysis score (39), but its price doubles in peak hours. GLM-5.3 Flash (August 26) is the only one without downloadable weights.
Side by side
| Naive-N0.5-Flash | MiMo-V2.6-Flash | DeepSeek V4.1 Flash | GLM-5.3 Flash | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor | NaiveAI (Beijing) | Xiaomi | DeepSeek | Z.ai |
| Released | Sep 27, 2026 | Sep 21, 2026 | Sep 10, 2026 | Aug 26, 2026 |
| Total / active params | 309B / 15.5B | 310B / 15B | 552B / 8B prefill, 16B decode (CED) | Undisclosed |
| Open weights | MIT | MIT | MIT | No (API only) |
| Context | 1M native | 1M | 1M | Not the headline |
| Max output | Not stated | 128K | 384K | Not stated |
| Input modalities | Text | Text + image + audio + video | Text | Text + image (natively multimodal) |
| Input / output price (per MTok) | $0.10 / $0.40 | $0.14 / $0.28 | $0.15 / $0.60 off-peak; $0.30 / $1.20 peak | $0.15 / $0.50 |
| Cache-read price | $0.01 | $0.0028 | $0.003 off-peak / $0.006 peak | $0.03 |
| Attention | 39 SWA + 9 DSA, no full attention | Xiaomi hybrid | DSA (DeepSeek) | Undisclosed |
| AA Intelligence Index | Not scored | Not scored (Pro sibling = 46) | 39 | Not on current index |
| Base lineage | MiMo-V2.5 continued pretraining | Xiaomi MiMo | DeepSeek V4 | GLM-5 |
| Best for | Long-context coding reads | Multimodal agents on a budget | Long outputs, cheapest off-peak | Z.ai Coding Plan users |
Price: structure matters more than the headline
Take a 30K-input / 5K-output agent step, the reference task used across andrew.ooo pricing pages:
- Naive-N0.5-Flash: 30 × $0.0001 + 5 × $0.0004 = $0.005
- MiMo-V2.6-Flash: 30 × $0.00014 + 5 × $0.00028 = $0.0056
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash: $0.0075 off-peak, $0.015 peak
- GLM-5.3 Flash: 30 × $0.00015 + 5 × $0.0005 = $0.007
Two things change that order. First, cache reads: Naive’s $0.01 cache read is 3.5× MiMo’s $0.0028 and 3.3× DeepSeek’s off-peak $0.003, so an agent loop that re-reads a large fixed context is cheapest on MiMo or DeepSeek, not Naive. Second, output-heavy work: at 10K output tokens per step MiMo pulls ahead of Naive. Model the ratio of your own workload before picking on list price. DeepSeek’s peak windows (01:00-04:00 and 06:00-10:00 UTC) land on Asia-Pacific business hours; US and EU daytime is off-peak.
Architecture: the same DSA idea, three ways
All three open models lean on DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) to make 1M context affordable. DeepSeek invented it for V4. Naive-N0.5-Flash took it furthest: it removed every full-attention layer, keeping 39 sliding-window layers (128-token window) and 9 DSA layers that attend to the top 2,048 tokens picked by a lightweight indexer, with GQA instead of MLA. The result is decode cost that does not grow with context length, at the price of still holding the full KV cache in memory. DeepSeek V4.1 Flash’s “CED” design uses 8B active parameters for prefill and 16B for decode, which is why its input price is low relative to output. MiMo-V2.6-Flash is Xiaomi’s own hybrid, and the only one of the group that takes image, audio and video natively.
Detail on Naive’s design in what is Naive-N0.5-Flash. On DeepSeek: DeepSeek V4.1 Flash vs V4 Pro vs Gemini 3.8 Flash. On GLM: what is GLM-5.3 Flash and Ox Alpha revealed as GLM-5.3 Flash.
Quality: what can and cannot be compared
- DeepSeek V4.1 Flash is the only one with an Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index score on the current scale: 39, versus 46 for MiMo-V2.6-Pro (the larger Xiaomi sibling), 53 for Fable 5.1 and GPT-6 Astra, and 58 for Claude Opus 5.5.
- Naive-N0.5-Flash’s coding and agentic numbers are vendor-run inside Claude Code 2.1.207 with 1M context, compared against vendor-reported scores for GLM-5.3, Kimi K3, Qwen 3.8 Max, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash and others. No independent reproduction as of September 28, 2026.
- MiMo-V2.6-Flash has no independent index score yet; the Pro variant’s 46 is the best available proxy and it is the top open-weight model on that index.
- GLM-5.3 Flash served as the stealth “Ox Alpha” model on roughly 100k domestic Chinese accelerators before being revealed; Z.ai’s earlier AA figure of 59.4 is on the older index scale and should not be mixed with the numbers above.
The honest summary: on published evidence, none of the four is clearly better at coding than the others. They are all priced as commodity inference, and the choice is structural.
Hallucination behavior, one data point
A September 27, 2026 web-extraction benchmark of 16 models found that with a “Use null… Do not guess” instruction, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash invented 3 of 36 missing fields, GLM-5.3 Flash invented 5 of 36, and MiMo 2.6 Flash invented 13 of 36. Naive-N0.5-Flash was not tested. One run, synthetic pages, overlapping confidence intervals — but if your workload is structured extraction, DeepSeek and GLM start ahead. Method in how to stop LLMs inventing fields in data extraction.
Decision rule
- Reading huge codebases or documents, output is short: Naive-N0.5-Flash. Cheapest input, flat decode at 1M.
- Agent re-reads the same big context every step: MiMo-V2.6-Flash or DeepSeek V4.1 Flash off-peak — cache reads are 3× cheaper than Naive’s.
- Needs screenshots, audio or video in the prompt: MiMo-V2.6-Flash, the only natively multimodal one with open weights.
- Very long generations (reports, migrations): DeepSeek V4.1 Flash, 384K max output, and schedule it off-peak.
- Must self-host: any of the three MIT models; GLM-5.3 Flash is out until Z.ai ships weights.
- Already paying for Z.ai’s Coding Plan (from $18/month): GLM-5.3 Flash, since the marginal cost is zero.
Last verified: September 28, 2026. DeepSeek prices are peak/off-peak; Naive’s API is announced but confirm availability before committing.