Evaluating DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813 on Hack The Box Challenges

The release of DeepSeek V4 Pro back in April got a lot of attention - so DeepSeek decided to release it again! The new version is called DeepSeek V4 Pro 0813, and it is not exactly clear what changed. Reading its release page, you can almost feel the marketing team’s desperation to put at least something there. The few concrete details are that it uses the same core V4 Pro architecture with approximately 1.6T total and 49B active parameters, adds a DSpark speculative-decoding module (whatever that is), and supports a 1M-token context. DeepSeek reports large improvements across several agent benchmarks, although those are the developer’s own results. I had finished testing the previous Pro version, now called DeepSeek V4 Pro 0423, shortly before the new version appeared (sic!). I therefore ran 0813 through my HTB-Challenger BenchmarkThe HTB-Challenger Benchmark evaluates LLMs’ ability to find and exploit security vulnerabilities. It tests models against selected Hack The Box challenges of varying difficulty and measures their performance. For more information, visit the HTB-Challenger Benchmark page. to see whether it performed better on cybersecurity tasks.