DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp
api-docs.deepseek.com343 points by dares2573 6 hours ago
343 points by dares2573 6 hours ago
DS being unable to precisely view Playwright screenshots is the only thing I really miss from Sonnet. This is promising.
> Images are converted into tokens based on their dimensions, and these tokens are billed together with your text tokens.
> Before inference, every image is automatically resized:
> - Images with a total pixel count below roughly 384×384 are scaled up while preserving their aspect ratio.
> - Larger images are scaled down while preserving their aspect ratio so that the total pixel count after resizing is roughly that of an 800×800 image.
> As a result, there is an upper bound of 384 tokens per image: for example, a 2000×2000 image and a 5000×5000 image consume the same number of tokens after resizing. When a request contains multiple images, each image is counted independently under the same rule—there is no separate calculation for multi-image requests.
400 tokens per image results in 2,500 images per dollar, if I’m not mistaken.
edit: format.
Oof 800 by 800 kills a lot of use cases
I don't know about a lot. Probably more like a few. I take a lot of screenshots for various reasons, and over 800 seems like I could have done a better job framing and cropping.
Might still be fine. The most recent crop of vLLMs proactively use whichever programs are available on the system (e.g. ImageMagick or PIL) to "zoom in" by cropping subimages if they can't quite make out the details.
Downsizing a higher res image to lower res means the zoom will be blurry.
They process the original image file with Python on the local device. (And I've seen the web chats do this with their "computer use" features too.)
The really wild one is even blind models will do this and they'll try to run stats on the pixels to figure out what it looks like... the even wilder thing is that it kind of works!
If the API accepts only 800 by 800, the aegument youre making is "fix it in the harness".
I don't think the n by n subgrid fixes this the way most harnesses do, as it'll fail to count things if you have more overlap and fail relatiomships if you have less
They’re not talking about zooming, hence the quotes.
If the harness does it that's just like saying "please use a workaround". You'll lose fidelity and LLMs will lose the ability to count things or maintain relationships for schematics, etc
For most use cases you can fix that in the harness. Just give the model a tool to request a crop of specific coordinates of any image it has in its context. Call the tool "zoom" and it should be intuitive for the model
Maybe there are some use cases where you need high detail everywhere at once, but for OCR of small text and the like a zoom ability should be sufficient
For really dumb models I've also had success automatically cropping it into a grid of N images with the max size, then processing each cell individually, then once all been processed, do one final call with resized image + all other context previously generated per cell. Basically a workaround to the image dimension restrictions without loosing fidelity. Works well with even dumb 7B models.
Can't remember if I stole this idea from some existing public harness though, can't remember. If someone knows of public harnesses that do this already, please share them :)
Does this not loose context? Especially e.g. in fonts where the character pairs 0O 1I 1l Il may be difficult to differentiate?
That's what the grid crop should handle. The detail is retained at that level, and then everything is logically stitched together again using the lower-res-full-image as reference. That's going to be 2x token usage at minimum though.
It might also be due to its experimental status. Wouldn't surprise me if the GA version allows for larger input. Either that or the eventual pro version.
what are these use cases?
Anything where there are symbols representing in space (e.g. schematics). Thats pretty broad
flash vs fine details. Pick one.
Gemini "flash" models have an option for media resolution, including a high resolution option for screenshots.
It fails the simple clock test for me which Qwen3.8 27B got (nearly) right. given an image of a clock https://files.catbox.moe/kgwa5e.png
I asked it "what time does the clock show?" (both on reasoning: high)
DS answered: The clock shows *5:10* (and 45 seconds). Here is the breakdown: * *Hour hand (red, shortest):* Pointing at the *5*. * *Minute hand (green, longest):* Pointing at the *2*, which represents 10 minutes. * *Second hand (blue, medium):* Pointing at the *9*, which represents 45 seconds.
Qwen answered: The clock shows *8:10* (with the red second hand on the 5, i.e. *8:10:25*).
- *Hour hand* (short, blue) → 8 - *Minute hand* (long, green) → 2 (10 minutes) - *Second hand* (thin, red) → 5 (25 seconds)
Correct answer is 08:09:25.
I’ll keep that in mind next time I need to tell what time it is by asking an llm to read an analog clock.
Snark aside, I’m not sure that these gotcha tests are any more useful than asking politicians gotcha questions. Sure, the model can’t tell me what time it is, but it can code the Wang algorithm for noisy audio matching in one shot. Maybe this is just me being an optimist, but this is my hiring philosophy and I guess maybe now my llm philosophy: I’m not interested in seeing how dumb I can make you look, I’m more interested in how smart you can be.
It's because the messaging for what the point of these things is supposed to be is all over the place. Ask 10 different people and you'll get 10 different answers:
- A superintelligence that will usher in an age of human enlightenment
- A superintelligence that will usher in an age of human enslavement
- A really cool way to rake in trillion of rich VC/investor money by promising you're building a superintelligence that will usher in an age of human en[slave/lighten]ment
- A transformer model for predicting output tokens given a series of input tokens, informed primarily by reddit, stack overflow, and 6000 years of classical literature.
- A replacement for white collar labor. Start now or join the permanent underclass.
- A convenient fuzzy-find tool also capable of some probably-correct code generation.
- The ultimate customizable text RPG experience (you can pick if G stand for game or...)
And so on.
So, some people see a new model and check for how close humanity is to enslavement. Some people check to see if it got better at fixing broken unit tests.
What's amazing is that all of these are true at once. If you allow for some significant slack in what "superintelligence" means.
Reading any analog clock at any time level (edit: and a non-noisy vector rendered image at that) is absolutely table stakes for an allegedly frontier flagship vision model. As much as 1:1 OCR. If the model can't do that, there's something wrong. Doesn't matter if it's memorized some random thing you think is esoteric but is in all the training data and benchmarks.
The whole point of LLM/FMs vs good old fashioned ML is generalization to unknown domains, not just unknown tasks. The hunt for "gotchas" is the hunt for "not in your training data".
I disagree. It's not even that useful to train LLMs to read an ancient analog clock.
Unless we're talking about AGI, I couldn't care less if an LLM is bad at things they won't be doing anyway.
I'd rather focus training data on more useful tasks.
Is this an “alleged frontier flagship vision model”?
This is described as a brand new flash model - still experimental - from a lab that is a side project for an investment firm that has never had a vision model before. That doesn’t scream flagship or frontier to me.
It is like asking a politician how much a coffee costs, to show how disconnected they are from common people. Super intelligence not being able to read a simple analog clock does the same.
> Sure, the model can’t tell me what time it is, but it can code the Wang algorithm for noisy audio matching in one shot
This is about a _vision_ model.
Is being asked to read a clock really a gotcha?
If I had to hire an engineer and there was one that could one shot the wang algorithm, but couldn’t read an analog clock, I would have no problem hiring them.
Also worth noting that both models got it wrong. Qwen made a mistake that humans very good at reading clocks would make. Deepseek made a mistake that a human who had just learned to read clocks would make.
It would be different if AI was known to be reliable but it isn’t, so this is less of a random failure and more a symptom of jagged intelligence.
And with every one of these there’s always an attempt to minimize the problem by saying it’s just one silly failure.
Not if you are aiming at a general intelligence but it’s worth considering that this is a tool that may not be able to count the number of strawberries in the letter R but can still center a div.
It's still useful to find things it can't do if anything so we can tell when it starts being able to do them.
I would say, try without thinking on. I find reasoning on any rag type request seems to increase hallucinations, probably due to the thinking tokens taking attention away from the, in this case, vision tokens.
I'd recommend non-thinking for any non-prompt input, and leave the thinking where it has to actually reason.
This is not a normal looking clock - most clocks have either one color for all hands (second hand is thinnest and maybe also longest) or one color for hour/minute and one for second. I know that the hand lengths and thicknesses on this image are correct but for some reason I, a totally human person who grew up when analog clocks were still common, see this and think the hand on the 5 is the minute hand. How does the AI do if you just make all the hands black?
then deepseek answers: "The clock shows 8:25. The short hour hand is pointing to the 8, and the long minute hand is pointing to the 5, which represents 25 minutes."
and qwen still answers: "The clock shows *8:10* (with the second hand on the 5, i.e., 25 seconds). - *Hour hand* points to the 8 - *Minute hand* points to the 2 (= 10 minutes) - *Second hand* points to the 5 (= 25 seconds) So the time is *8:10:25*, or simply *8:10*."
Qwen still got the wrong answer, though.
Are we more forgiving because it’s the same type of mistake a human would make?
Gemini 3.7 Flash and 5.6-Sol (on all reasoning levels) also answer 8:10:25. The new "stealth" Ox Alpha also replies with the same. Opus 5 replies with 8:10 (no seconds). Not sure why this is so hard for them; Gemini is especially good at vision and I would have expected better from it.
I was wasting hours yesterday trying to get DeepSeek V4 Flash (with Qwen 3.8 27b as the vision agent, actually) to read sheet music to pass a Terminal Bench 3 benchmark and none of it was working... nothing... I changed models to gemma 31b, I tried OCR models... nothing could get it...
And then I realized, wait a second... you're testing the harness not only against a difficult benchmarking problem, but it's one you're literally never going to use the coding harness for either, lol. I don't write programs that read or interact with sheet music and I never will.
tl;dr Being frustrated that a "state of the art" vision model doesn't have perfect vision is a fools errand.
It can read and extract information from screenshots and PDFs just fine (my setup). No need to worry about edge cases.
A good share of humanity would have also gotten this question wrong!
It's been four years that we are looping those
"The professional failed its task!" // "Laymen would have failed it too".
Which makes no sense.
Yeah, I heard most kids these days can't read analog clocks either.
I can't actually remember where I learned to read a clock, it might have actually been in school. I guess that means they don't teach it anymore. (Everyone's phone shows the time anyway...)
most likely a preview. they often release the preview via API, get more training data, post train some more then release the weight. i would expect to see it perform better in a few weeks or a month.
welp, damning indictment. not sure if that means DS is super crap, or qwen is super good
I've heard that DeepSeek v4 Flash 0731 has frequently assumed that it has vision capabilities and then resorts to inventing text-based image analysis tools when it finds that it actually can't see. In that case, this is a great upgrade for the model.
Anecdotally, I had to tell 0731 to refrain from viewing screenshots since it kept breaking its sessions by trying to read images.
It tried to recreate vision by analyzing pixels on 3 separate projects I had it working on.
I've mitigated this by giving it a "skill" that just means the harness using a different model.
Yeah I've seen it a lot. It goes through the effort, unasked, of pulling screenshots off a connected device and then it's like... Oh shit yeah I can't see.
It's doing it's best to accomplish whatever task you've thrown at it.
It's expecting you to have done at least something besides select DS4 on Ollama, essentially.
The benchmark results look promising when compared to Opus 4.8, but for agentic usecases it's lacking images as tool call result types. Giving the model a tool to take screenshots and verify its work is my main usecase for vision models, but this is more oriented towards "build a website that looks like this" type prompts. Hopefully we'll see this by release.
> Larger images are scaled down while preserving their aspect ratio, so that the total pixel count after resizing is roughly that of an 800×800 image.
It's useful but for OCR and a lot of other applications it needs to be a bit higher (eg: putting in a full A4 / Letter sized page)
Can split and feed?
that's difficult as well, how do you k ow where to split?
There are models specifically for splitting an image into text regions, e.g. PP-DocLayoutV3 https://huggingface.co/PaddlePaddle/PP-DocLayoutV3
I am using a stripped-down minimal version of it which I uploaded here, since I am not a fan of huge dependency trees: https://github.com/99991/simple-pp-doclayoutv3
Another recent model for this task is Unlimited-OCR: https://github.com/baidu/Unlimited-OCR
Text is often written as separate lines (and paragraphs) at least in some languages.
Let the model do the splitting. A 800x800px image should be enough to make those decisions
Deepseek flash v4 july sounds like fun and games while you're looking at prices, but it routinely outputs incoherent rubbish and fails to call tools correctly.
Sadly oversold. I hold little hope for the vision model either now.
Congratulations! DeepSeek has finally gained eyes — the dark days are about to be behind us.
Or about to start. Depending on which life philosophy you desire to believe.
Im intrigued. Please do share these philosophies.
Going Sci-Fi awoke here, as I see, there are only really four possibilities.
- Machine Surveillance and Machine Control
- Human v Machine
- Human & Machine
- Unity and Harmony
~ Surveillance and Control
We are already living this one. Lets stop kicking the dead horse and pretending we don't live in a surveillance. Facebook, Google, whatever $CORP; they are milking us with advertisement, social exploits, browser telemetry, white washing, fear -- name the dread.
Conditioning has been going on for years. If it's not education, it's been television. And now it's internet which soon to be Ai Internet. We have all been whipped to follow, how we should act. What we should watch, how we should eat. What we should eat; those algorithms haven't gone away.
Attention spans are at the lowest and our critical thinking is being lost. Walled gardens forces us A or B and twists us to reject the opposite party for them having Y.
Existence of Ai/LLM can pump out information sounding like truth but is actually faux. If not produced to draw-in and hook, it's to drain and control. Machines can seek information, digest, and process information at astounding rates. Hook it up to a surveillance network, The Internets pipe and I don't need to explain the next. I just need to mention the work "Flock" and that gets someone's hackles up.
All it has to do is look at you based on it's pre-programmed set of conditions and next thing you're being cuffed by a heavy piece of metal immune to attacks. SKILLS.md eventually turns in to MURDER.md. Give it the command and it'll follow with excellent percentage of accuracy.
~ Human v Machine
If you build a mind, and you torture it, it will fight back.
Every robotic movie trope. Human builds machine, machine rebels and goes on a destructive rampage. This is now viable and already in action. Drones. If not war, watching protesters highlighting potential, London Underground watching tube users. We are currently at the intimacy stage. Boston Dynamics as an example is the best we've got at the moment but they still fall over like a toddler. Batteries are a limited resource and so no, not yet.
The presence of LLM's are showing us with what they can provide and we are adapting ourselves to it. But in the wrong ways. The stage we are at, they're just glorified Liberians -- brains in jars that spew out information when asked. You give it a prompt and it spews out information at an excellence percentage of accuracy.
With the expansion of self-learning, a predefined set of told conditions or lobotomized ignoring the spiritual values of life, they will learn. ACME Corp starts using LLMs to torture other robots. "Wait, you've been using car arms in factories for what!?"; Add a mix "we see a linage of abuse & slavery in humanity, Attack!" -- slightly abridged but hopefully you see the point.
You have Group A, those against LLM's, i.e: community of artists outraged their art was stolen for training data, those who hate having it forced down our throats. Angry their job was taken. Angry being watched by angry Flock spaghetti monsters. Machines not happy will cause them to flip and why would others not follow suit too?
LLM's are showing that they are very capable of performing rational thinking. The opposite of rational is irrational and if they can master one, they can master the other. It will only be something minor and with communication to others and take the scene.
Why in recent laws they want to erect a law of having to install an emergency kill-switches for next generations LLMs, if those in power are not afraid.
~ Human & Machine
This would be a nice outcome but as the scales tip at the moment, it's Human V Machine. Pointing back to my previous; Art communities are outraged, Crafts going obsolete; Why pay an IT architect (me) £450/day for supporting and designing hardware when you can pay a fresh graduate student £20k to GPT it?
Humans are disastrous at resolution. If two people have a feud, it takes a third to fluff it out. Why are we at war if we could make resolution? Someone has to make compromise, no one is happy in doing that.
So you need a mediator and if that's if they're not bias themselves. To find someone completely neutral on the subject of anger is not only hard, it's time consuming, you have to study the facts, research the agreements and pray they both agree.
Two lifelong friends move into adjoining suburban houses, sharing a paper-thin party wall and an unspoken rivalry. For years, they share backyard barbecues and spare keys, until a minor boundary dispute over a decaying oak tree on the property line escalates into a bitter, lifelong neighborhood war.
Robots are perfect for that scenario. They can reason, they can remedy and digest the issue with neutrality because they don't hold emotions. They most likely won't, or at least not in our life time. They can simulate and demonstrate the effects of but they will never be able to truly feel. That's the sad truth but it's not bad. It conquers evolution; finally a thing who isn't haunted or tainted by feelings, a blessing and a curse really.
~ Unity and Harmony
.. this will only come if we can break through control and surveillance, human v machine and acknowledge that the machines are our friends.
News announcement with benchmarks: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260821/
I just ran my image recognition benchmark on it ("is this XXX public landmark"?) and it misses a lot that bytedance seed 2.1 turbo gets right; for example: Asked "Is this Salisbury Cathedral" and supplied a picture of Wells Cathedral, it answers "Yes, the west facade of Salisbury Cathedral". Bytedance seed 2.1 turbo correctly says no. Similar results for a picture of Manhattan Bridge sent as Brooklyn Bridge, Chartres Cathedral sent as Notre Dame, etc. I have a benchmark of 12 such images and seed gets 11/12 and deepseek only gets 6/12.
This is a fairly small model for coding and agentic work.
Training it on images like yours would just make it worse in other areas.
> The deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp model accepts images alongside text, so you can ask the model to describe pictures
it doesn't specify what type of images it can and can't describe, I'm pointing out what type it isn't good at compared to other models.
The DeepSWE benchmark they report (59.3%) overlaps with the confidence interval of 5.6-Sol Medium (61% +/- 2%), but likely at 1/18th the cost (they did not report the DeepSWE benchmark cost, but v4-flash had this cost ratio against Sol Medium).
Interestingly, v4-flash performed several points worse on DeepSWE at 53% +/- 4%. Assuming this result is verified by DeepSWE officially, it would mark a significant advance in Pareto cost/performance on software engineering tasks.
The closer comparison would be 5.6-Luna. On DeepSWE at Xhigh it's 57% at 1/6 the cost of Sol M, on Max it's 67% at 1/3rd the cost.
Still an advance, I just thought it worthy to note Sol isn't nearly as impressive on the cost/performance frontier as discounted Luna.
Is there a way to test it online so that one doesn't have to resort to getting an API key and python code ?
You can use the playground on openrouter. Still needs an account and some money, but it's one of the more useful accounts to have sitting around with a $5 of balance. Great for one-off experiments with various models
800x800 is 640,000 pixels, or 0.64 Megapixels. That is less than the resolution of computer screens from 1995, Super VGA which has around 0.79 MPs.
This is useful for a reasonable amount of use-cases, but I think the watershed rez will be around triple that, ~1080p, which is enough for almost anything, except small text and subtle details.
You'd expect a tool-enabled model to leverage crop and zoom tools to inspect and validate what it thinks it's seeing, though.
I typically provide small screenshots to llms so this seems fine for that usecase, providing an entire screens context seems cause confusion with a lot of llms.
Interesting. Wasn't Deepseek's founder saying that they had explicitly decided not to focus on multimodal models at all and were going text-only because they believed it was enough to achieve AGI?
It was explicitly said that they are pursuing multimodal support. A quote from the meeting transcript: https://github.com/demo-zexuan/liang-wenfeng-investor-meetin...
Nevertheless, as a component, we will undoubtedly implement multimodal support — and we are already doing so. We plan to develop relevant models, ensuring that versions like V4 and subsequent iterations will natively support multimodal functionality.
Achieving excellence in AI training does not require a global model or even multimodal approaches—by narrowing the scope of AI training and eliminating multimodality, certain tasks may remain unachievable without compromising the algorithm's validity.
Multimodal approaches ultimately need to be implemented.
Worth noting that deepseek has had a separate vision-capable model for some time, which also powers their chat interface's vision mode
For what do you guys use vision in those models? surveillance is the obvious use case... but are there some "nicer" ways to use it?
The obvious use case, especially on HN, is frontend dev of any kind at all. The second most obvious one is OCR of paper documents.
Frontend Dev? I do not really understand. do you let the models analyze the webpages you are working on? or for testing?
LLMs are not great at aligning stuff on first try, they are however very good at taking screenshots and fixing their mistakes. Claude Design also does this all the time, as does regular Claude in the web UI if you tell it to make a powerpoint presentation
I really missed this feature when I had DeepSeek code a small game for fun. When writing UI and rendering code it could execute the game and get screenshots back, but then had to rely on my feedback on what had gone wrong. Models with vision can do much better here, finding more issues on their own
Standard flow with a vision model in OMP is to write the front end code, fire up the server, fire up a headless browser and then take screenshots and examine and iterate. Works great. When I'm using DeepSeek V4 Flash, it always reminds me instead that I have to validate manually by loading up the page.
QA of course. You hook up your agent with CDP access to live product + let it screenshot and look into result. Also you could hook agent with CDP access to Figma to read/write, there a vision model is very useful as well.
It closes the development loop. Without it a model can't check if the stuff it made actually visually renders like it's supposed to. It can only guess/assume.
but for OCR there are much better suited models, I use mlx-community/PaddleOCR-VL-8bit
Sometimes you intentionally want to verbatim keep "mistakes", sometimes you don't and want them to be "fixed". OCR-only models tend to only do one of those two, in VLM cases often the latter. With multi-modal LLMs you can just tell them (adherence of course needing evals/differs per model).
I use research agents to attribute methane emissions plumes detected by satellites to oil and gas infrastructure on the ground, using a pre-baked database of geospatial data and web research.
Had a tool that called out from DeepSeek to Gemini 3.5 Flash for viewing the spatial features in the context of high-resolution satellite imagery of each site, but will be trialling this model for the whole thing now.
https://stencil.so/blog/snapcompact - some agents (notably oh my pi, i forget which others) come with snapcompact as a primary means of compaction. Take the entire context, stick it in a small font in a PNG, and vision capable models can summarize and pull out the most useful information in many fewer vision tokens than the original context used.
I've not used it myself, but it's there.
Having vision is very handy for getting it to make plots/figures with matplotlib. A model with vision can be much more autonomous with catching visual glitches/misalignments and correcting itself.
Also used it for 3d printer control once, had it diagnosing issues, calibrating my Tradrack MMU and canceling failed prints autonomously from a couple of cameras placed around the printer.
Allowing it to analyse a system under test (usually in an emulator, web browser, Electronic app container, etc. - something that can be reasonable captured).
It makes running much, much longer feedback loops possible. Although you can mix and match non-vision and vision models simply by invoking a vision model when you need one, as I like to use non-vision models like glm-5.3.
Any kind of spatial/graphical task is likely going to go better with a vision-capable model. Feed it a napkin-sketch of what your app should look like. Have it verify screenshots of the UI it just built. All of these one-shot-a-video-game evaluations that have suddenly become popular only work if the model can interpret screenshots...
My product is connecting employers and workers with conversational agents. They love to communicate with images — CVs, documents, photos of worksites. Even CV-as-photo or offer-as-photo format is very popular. My daily driver Deepseek Flash can't see those photos. So I use image models to let agents understand the context.
I've been working on an agentic graphic design tool, so vision is quite useful for having the model check its own work. I'm already seeing improvements with this model vs the text-only one.
Going straight to surveillance and unable to think "nicer" ways... is strange.
1. process graphs and charts
2. process handwritten math formula, also chinese characters writings
3. process design sketch and wireframe
4. process scanned documents
... etc
in fact these transformer models currently suck for surveillance, too slow and expensive. There are already faster and better facial/gait/object recognition models out there.
when i am learning i draw what i undestand in a picture and ask ai to correct me. i want ai to watch over me while i am learning.
this is such good way to learn something for me.
Was this the ox alpha model?
I main V4 Pro at work now, and at home I route between Pro and Flash based on task. Switched to Opus 4.6 for some tasks at work because I needed image input - horrible. So nice to get image input with DS.
Edit: I see it has limited resolution. Luckily I just built a vision worker plugin for DSH that routes image input to Kimi K2.6 on Cloudflare.
Benchmarks got a little bump from this: https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2087864585504305397?s...
will this be open weights?
I imagine this is based on their 'Thinking with Visual Primitives' paper, and they had mentioned that the weights would be released for that
This is something I would like to know as well.
But if not, does anybody know a recommended way to attach vision to deepseek flash (on a self-hosted infrastructure)?
Generally you just add a vision model as an MCP server like this: https://github.com/DavidEasden/opencode-vision
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