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Posted by dares2573 6 hours ago

DeepSeek-v4-flash-vision-exp(api-docs.deepseek.com)
344 points | 114 comments
ciberado 5 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.

knollimar 5 hours ago||
Oof 800 by 800 kills a lot of use cases
stronglikedan 8 minutes ago|||
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.
johndough 5 hours ago||||
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.
knollimar 2 hours ago||
Downsizing a higher res image to lower res means the zoom will be blurry.
andai 2 hours ago|||
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!

knollimar 1 hour ago||
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

adastra22 47 minutes ago|||
They’re not talking about zooming, hence the quotes.
knollimar 15 minutes ago||
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
wongarsu 5 hours ago||||
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

embedding-shape 4 hours ago||
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 :)

dotancohen 4 hours ago||
Does this not loose context? Especially e.g. in fonts where the character pairs 0O 1I 1l Il may be difficult to differentiate?
skeledrew 3 hours ago||
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.
shadyr 5 hours ago||||
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.
Chnmy 2 hours ago||||
what are these use cases?
knollimar 2 hours ago||
Anything where there are symbols representing in space (e.g. schematics). Thats pretty broad
asdfsa32 5 hours ago|||
flash vs fine details. Pick one.
Doohickey-d 5 hours ago||
Gemini "flash" models have an option for media resolution, including a high resolution option for screenshots.
skeledrew 3 hours ago||
At what price point?
13639366668 3 hours ago||
[flagged]
leumon 2 hours ago||
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.

dghlsakjg 2 hours ago||
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.

atomicnumber3 1 hour ago|||
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.

KerrAvon 1 hour ago||
What's amazing is that all of these are true at once. If you allow for some significant slack in what "superintelligence" means.
jubilanti 1 hour ago||||
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".

bel8 19 minutes ago|||
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.

dghlsakjg 42 minutes ago|||
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.

altruios 1 hour ago||||
Knowing where it fails is just as important as knowing where is excels.
mejutoco 1 hour ago||||
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.

CooCooCaCha 1 hour ago||||
Is being asked to read a clock really a gotcha?
dghlsakjg 1 hour ago|||
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.

CooCooCaCha 32 minutes ago||
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.

arjie 1 hour ago|||
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.
vasco 1 hour ago|||
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.
mkatx 1 hour ago|||
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.

emosenkis 2 hours ago|||
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?
leumon 2 hours ago||
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*."

dghlsakjg 2 hours ago||
Qwen still got the wrong answer, though.

Are we more forgiving because it’s the same type of mistake a human would make?

ComputerGuru 2 hours ago|||
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.
johnnyApplePRNG 1 hour ago|||
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.

ttul 2 hours ago|||
A good share of humanity would have also gotten this question wrong!
mdp2021 2 hours ago|||
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.

andai 2 hours ago|||
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...)

segmondy 1 hour ago|||
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.
nubg 2 hours ago||
welp, damning indictment. not sure if that means DS is super crap, or qwen is super good
wolttam 2 hours ago||
Neither. Performance of all models is incredibly spikey.
LorenDB 5 hours ago||
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.

VulgarExigency 4 hours ago||
It tried to recreate vision by analyzing pixels on 3 separate projects I had it working on.
trollbridge 2 hours ago|||
I've mitigated this by giving it a "skill" that just means the harness using a different model.
mavamaarten 2 hours ago||
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.
johnnyApplePRNG 1 hour ago||
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.

zmmmmm 5 hours ago||
> 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)

mkagenius 5 hours ago|
Can split and feed?
throwaw12 5 hours ago||
that's difficult as well, how do you k ow where to split?
johndough 4 hours ago|||
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

kgwgk 4 hours ago||||
Text is often written as separate lines (and paragraphs) at least in some languages.
wongarsu 4 hours ago||||
Let the model do the splitting. A 800x800px image should be enough to make those decisions
grog454 4 hours ago||||
Overlap the splits?
vrganj 5 hours ago|||
Presumably a small cheap model could do that part?
RobertLong 1 hour ago||
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.
BrucecarlL 5 hours ago||
Congratulations! DeepSeek has finally gained eyes — the dark days are about to be behind us.
doublerabbit 3 hours ago|
Or about to start. Depending on which life philosophy you desire to believe.
unified101 2 hours ago||
Im intrigued. Please do share these philosophies.
doublerabbit 36 minutes ago||
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.

meetpateltech 3 hours ago||
News announcement with benchmarks: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260821/
jerkstate 2 hours ago||
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.
throwa356262 49 minutes ago|
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.

jerkstate 35 minutes ago||
> 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.

nprateem 9 minutes ago||
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.

ttul 2 hours ago|
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.

paytonjjones 2 hours ago|
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.

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