Fun fact, I was trying this afternoon Deepseek vs Opus 4.8 high, and I was surprised at how good Deepseek was. It outperformed Opus 4.8 on multiple occasions.

Found just later I was using v4 flash and not pro (for mistakenly setting the model to deepseek-chat and not v4-pro).

There are aspects about Deepseek I don't like though, when pushed against it will eagerly bend instead of reasoning and advocating for his points, something Opus 4.7 and later models started doing a lot (even when wrong).