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

https://openrouter.ai/deepseek/deepseek-v4-flash-vision-exp

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.

Nope. Handles vision differently.

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.

Earlier, the following was said, which might match more what you had in mind.

    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.

It is difficult to tell who said what, since the speaker ids are missing.

Worth noting that deepseek has had a separate vision-capable model for some time, which also powers their chat interface's vision mode

I think you're thinking of Dario saying this about image generation.

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.

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.

In the feedback loop when working on anything UI or graphical output related.

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.

frontend design work, game development

No one’s mentioned robots, so… robots. VLA models, etc.

Generating alt text for images in social media posts.

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.

[dead]

That would've been a very strange arrangement.

Correct link

https://xcancel.com/deepseek_ai/status/2090730032574631962

I believe so. Openness has always been a consistent tradition of DeepSeek

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)?