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DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp

350 pointsby dares2573today at 10:33 AM116 commentsview on HN

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ciberadotoday at 11:08 AM

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.

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LorenDBtoday at 11:00 AM

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.

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leumontoday at 2:04 PM

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.

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zmmmmmtoday at 11:06 AM

> 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)

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RobertLongtoday at 3:31 PM

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.

BrucecarlLtoday at 11:31 AM

Congratulations! DeepSeek has finally gained eyes — the dark days are about to be behind us.

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meetpateltechtoday at 1:02 PM

News announcement with benchmarks: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260821/

jerkstatetoday at 2:20 PM

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.

ttultoday at 2:28 PM

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.

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wiz21ctoday at 1:11 PM

Is there a way to test it online so that one doesn't have to resort to getting an API key and python code ?

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nprateemtoday at 4:34 PM

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.

gozucitotoday at 11:29 AM

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.

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erikkritoday at 12:07 PM

Hello Ox Alpha?

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v9vtoday at 11:23 AM

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?

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5kyn3ttoday at 12:23 PM

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?

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Johnny_Bonktoday at 1:37 PM

Was this the ox alpha model?

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try-workingtoday at 11:59 AM

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.

dsrtslnd23today at 11:17 AM

will this be open weights?

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cryptolobstertoday at 3:44 PM

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promptspheretoday at 2:35 PM

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locitratoday at 12:17 PM

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lzytoday at 11:15 AM

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MagicMoonlighttoday at 12:30 PM

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jaksdbvqi37utoday at 11:40 AM

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