Performance Benchmarks for deepseek-v3.2-exp-thinking

Analyze how deepseek-v3.2-exp-thinking stacks up against other frontier models in terms of cost-to-performance and raw intelligence (LMArena Elo).

2026 Performance Summary

🚀 Intelligence (Elo): 1425
💰 API Cost (Input): $2.7e-7 / 1M tokens
⚡ API Cost (Output): $4.1e-7 / 1M tokens
⏱️ Real-world Throughput: 8 tokens/s

Analysis: While deepseek-v3.2-exp-thinking is a capable model, it is currently outperformed in efficiency by gpt-5.2-chat-latest-20260210. gpt-5.2-chat-latest-20260210 sits higher on the Pareto line, offering approximately 52 points more intelligence (Elo) for a comparable or lower API cost.

Highly Recommended Alternatives

Frontier Model	LMArena Elo	API Cost (1M)	Throughput
gpt-5.2-chat-latest-20260210	1477	$0.00000175	37
gemini-3-flash	1474	$5e-7	67
qwen3.6-plus-preview	1453	$3.25e-7	38
gemma-4-31b	1451	$1.4e-7	5
gemma-4-26b-a4b	1438	$1.2e-7	22

*These models represent the Pareto Frontier (optimal cost-to-performance).*