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75% Positive

Analyzed from 1703 words in the discussion.

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#image#model#vision#models#deepseek#screenshots#images#https#text#flash

Discussion (66 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

leumon3 minutes 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.

ciberadoabout 3 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.

knollimarabout 3 hours ago
Oof 800 by 800 kills a lot of use cases
johndoughabout 3 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.
knollimar5 minutes ago
Downsizing a higher res image to lower res means the zoom will be blurry.
wongarsuabout 3 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-shapeabout 2 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 :)

Chnmy18 minutes ago
what are these use cases?
knollimar3 minutes ago
Anything where there are symbols representing in space (e.g. schematics). Thats pretty broad
shadyrabout 2 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.
asdfsa32about 3 hours ago
flash vs fine details. Pick one.
Doohickey-dabout 3 hours ago
Gemini "flash" models have an option for media resolution, including a high resolution option for screenshots.
LorenDBabout 3 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.

trollbridge15 minutes ago
I've mitigated this by giving it a "skill" that just means the harness using a different model.
mavamaarten7 minutes 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.
VulgarExigencyabout 2 hours ago
It tried to recreate vision by analyzing pixels on 3 separate projects I had it working on.
zmmmmmabout 3 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)

mkageniusabout 3 hours ago
Can split and feed?
throwaw12about 3 hours ago
that's difficult as well, how do you k ow where to split?
johndoughabout 2 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

kgwgkabout 2 hours ago
Text is often written as separate lines (and paragraphs) at least in some languages.
wongarsuabout 2 hours ago
Let the model do the splitting. A 800x800px image should be enough to make those decisions
grog454about 2 hours ago
Overlap the splits?
vrganjabout 2 hours ago
Presumably a small cheap model could do that part?
meetpateltechabout 1 hour ago
News announcement with benchmarks: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260821/
BrucecarlLabout 3 hours ago
Congratulations! DeepSeek has finally gained eyes — the dark days are about to be behind us.
doublerabbitabout 1 hour ago
Or about to start. Depending on which life philosophy you desire to believe.
Johnny_Bonk30 minutes ago
Was this the ox alpha model?
wiz21cabout 1 hour ago
Is there a way to test it online so that one doesn't have to resort to getting an API key and python code ?
wongarsu36 minutes ago
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

erikkriabout 2 hours ago
Hello Ox Alpha?
5kyn3tabout 2 hours ago
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?
hgoel12 minutes ago
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.

deauxabout 2 hours ago
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.
5kyn3tabout 2 hours ago
Frontend Dev? I do not really understand. do you let the models analyze the webpages you are working on? or for testing?
wongarsu32 minutes ago
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

rpdillonabout 1 hour ago
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.
deauxabout 1 hour ago
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.
dandakaabout 1 hour ago
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.
dandakaabout 2 hours ago
but for OCR there are much better suited models, I use mlx-community/PaddleOCR-VL-8bit
deauxabout 1 hour ago
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).
trollbridge14 minutes ago
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.

kzrdude16 minutes ago
In the feedback loop when working on anything UI or graphical output related.
wolttam14 minutes ago
No one’s mentioned robots, so… robots. VLA models, etc.
swiftcoderabout 1 hour ago
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...
dcre25 minutes ago
Generating alt text for images in social media posts.
dandakaabout 2 hours ago
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.
moonuabout 1 hour ago
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.
dudisubekti41 minutes ago
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.

v9vabout 3 hours ago
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?
johndoughabout 2 hours ago
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.
swiftcoderabout 1 hour ago
Worth noting that deepseek has had a separate vision-capable model for some time, which also powers their chat interface's vision mode
dakolliabout 2 hours ago
I think you're thinking of Dario saying this about image generation.
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try-workingabout 2 hours ago
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.

pu_peabout 2 hours ago
gozucitoabout 3 hours ago
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.

barrkelabout 3 hours ago
You'd expect a tool-enabled model to leverage crop and zoom tools to inspect and validate what it thinks it's seeing, though.
dakolliabout 2 hours ago
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.
dsrtslnd23about 3 hours ago
will this be open weights?
moonuabout 2 hours ago
I imagine this is based on their 'Thinking with Visual Primitives' paper, and they had mentioned that the weights would be released for that
dares2573about 2 hours ago
I believe so. Openness has always been a consistent tradition of DeepSeek
griffithsabout 2 hours ago
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)?

traversedaabout 2 hours ago
Generally you just add a vision model as an MCP server like this: https://github.com/DavidEasden/opencode-vision