DeepSeek Introduces Vision

(chat.deepseek.com)

174 points | by RIshabh235 4 hours ago

22 comments

  • jiehong 3 hours ago
    For those not trying, this allows Deepseek to understand a picture (instead of just extracting text from it), and it can describe what's in the picture, but this is not an image generation system, so you can't ask it to modify an image.

    Personally, I'm a bit surprised the DS chat app still doesn't offer its own text to speech and speech to text features (I know DS doesn't have any ASR model for example, but there are quite a few in the open).

    • paulluuk 2 hours ago
      Can you explain what the benefits are of actually "talking" with the bot instead of typing and reading?

      As someone who would rather send a slack message to a coworker rather than actually walking over and talk to them, the idea of having to talk with my laptop is not appealing at all, haha.

      • weitendorf 1 hour ago
        I thought this way until I tried it, and the main difference is that when I'm managing tons of agents at once or just reviewing some plan / approving next steps, or need to give quick feedback/ask a simple followup, the voice interface makes me much faster and more likely to continue because it's lower friction (and in many cases that's good, though not all) and can be hands-free.

        Actually, my thoughts on this matter changed so much that it inspired me to get much more into voice controls because I realized how this same problem was basically why some people sucked at remote work or weren't able to properly use tools like claude code, because it was essentially the same problem but worse (typing / messaging feeling too high-friction or raising the barrier for participation). I have a way to let Claude call me now to tell me stuff when I have a bunch of instances out doing stuff and then leave to go home.

        I'm trying to get that better integrated in my devloop because I think it makes managing >4 agents simultaneously much more feasible and natural for some people (I used to play Starcraft a lot so I'm used to the multitasking, but it still takes sustained willpower to be constantly "driving" or monitoring things, or to field questions), especially ones who have never served as TLs or people managers before. IMO it's a big performance roadblock for a lot of developers to be treat directing multiple agents simultaneously as some kind of high-stakes/high-cost thing. The kind of developer who would not say anything in a team meeting unless prompted or who thinks everything is stupid by default (because they are afraid of making decisions / being wrong even if only briefly) is both very common and reluctant to work this way, but also really probably needs it to be as productive as more skilled developers.

      • itake 1 hour ago
        I am someone that prefers a slack message to a coworker than talking to them and I use AI.

        My current flow is: Google Eloquent to capture 127WPM (my typing is best case is 65wpm). This lets me get the thoughts out without thinking too much about structure or flow, the same way I would brain-dump type it.

        Next I use AI to compress, summarize, and restructure to create a clear coherent message for my peer to read (which is way faster for them).

        When communicating with AI, its the same thing, except I skip the second step since AI does a good job at understanding my ramblings.

        ----

        It drives me crazy that some cultures only send voice messages to each other. It drives me crazy they can't be respectful of my time and use STT+AI to convert their 90 second monologue to a few written sentences.

      • noduerme 2 minutes ago
        This may sound strange and even callous, but I think it's appealing to people who are used to having employees. It's not about speech being a better interface, it's that thinking hard enough to sit down and compose a prompt is just too much work if you're used to just yelling at someone.

        Pity the managers with no one left to boss around besides the machines coming for their own jobs.

        I was asked just yesterday if I could wire up

      • cicko 1 hour ago
        If you spend your life sitting in a chair, that's fine. I tend to get all kinds of ideas, questions, and research needs while I'm walking around. Typing a paragraph or two or context takes too much time and is very risky. Especially when driving. But also just walking, cooking, cleaning, etc. Sometimes it's just not practical - winter, carrying stuff... I mostly feel privileged if I can just sit at a computer and type my question and have the time to read the answer.
      • QuantumNomad_ 1 hour ago
        When I was still using OpenAI, I used it among other things to translate from English to Spanish while talking to Spanish-speaking people in person.

        I understand a bit Spanish but I don’t speak Spanish yet, and they don’t speak English.

        I speak English to the AI and end with “translate to Spanish, translation only”, and then the AI says the thing I was saying in Spanish (not perfect but good enough, and also it has a slightly weird accent that might be it using English or English influenced text to speech even when speaking Spanish sentences?).

      • stranded22 2 hours ago
        Accessibility.
      • arcanemachiner 2 hours ago
        Much faster and better flow. Don't knock it til you've tried it.
      • throawayonthe 2 hours ago
        it's very confusing. maaaybe if the stt is good and fast enough, speaking may be faster? english speakers can probably hit 150-180 wpm but seems like a hassle
      • perching_aix 1 hour ago
        It's easier, faster, and more natural to talk than to type for the vast, vast majority of people.

        This trivial fact of life is observed every day by e.g.:

        - students taking notes and finding it necessary to only jot down key facts so that they can keep up,

        - stenographers who require special training and equipment to keep up verbatim with live speech in the courtroom,

        - annoying colleagues who insist on "hopping on a quick call" or arranging big, wasteful, and disruptive meetings instead of just writing down their problem / sending a message or email,

        - friends who insist on sending short voice messages in DMs instead of typing, because it's more "personal" that way (which to be fair it is, but not to the extent proclaimed).

  • harryf 18 minutes ago
    Could go nicely with https://auge.franzai.com/ ( CLI on Apple Vision frameworks ) - do the first pass locally. If needed call their API for a more detailed analysis and then _finally_ we produce meaningful alt texts for images in HTML at a reasonable price ;)
  • vitorgrs 5 minutes ago
    I already had it for months? What's the news here?
  • rcMgD2BwE72F 4 hours ago
    Points to https://chat.deepseek.com/sign_in for me, that's just a login screen. Anything page with some info?
  • bjoli 4 hours ago
    What has been going on with deepseek recently? I have gotten lots of replies in Chinese and even more frequently, reasoning in Chinese as well.

    Is it a new silent update?

    • throwa356262 1 hour ago
      Happened to me with Claude, doesn't need to be a China thing.
    • Shank 4 hours ago
      Well, it is a Chinese model, maybe it thinks better in Chinese?
      • rurban 8 minutes ago
        A chinese model which tells me it is Claude from Anthropic? Not really. Chinese HW yes, SW not.
      • bogdan 2 hours ago
        Hànzì can use 30%-40% fewer tokens than English. So, yes, it probably thinks better in Chinese.
        • Razengan 2 hours ago
          If so, would other models like ChatGPT benefit from translating the user's prompt to Chinese/Japanese and thinking in Hanzi/Kanji and then converting the response back to the user's language before displaying it?
          • cocoflunchy 2 hours ago
            I believe that most reasoning models actually think in their own "language" which is not really understandable by humans. The thinking traces that are shown in the UI are actually summaries generated by a smaller model in plain english (or user language). Sometimes this leaks through and you see some chinese/japanese characters in e.g. Claude's reasoning.
            • dryarzeg 1 hour ago
              As far as I'm aware, it's not true for models like DeepSeek or other Chinese open-weight models (at least those that I have seen); their reasoning traces are fully composed from some human language, be it English, Chinese or another one; by the way, most of them can adapt their reasoning based on user language, for example, if user speaks English the reasoning more likely will be in English.

              I think that for DeepSeek problem (thinking and replying in Chinese) everything is kinda simpler: in their official chat, they're probably using some kind of system prompt which is (probably) written in Chinese, so that's why model may prefer Chinese in it's output.

            • kgeist 1 hour ago
              Summaries by different smaller models are usually made by closed proprietary models like Claude as a way to combat the distillation of real reasoning traces by competitors. Open weight models show the real reasoning traces. Reasoning traces operate in the same space as the non-reasoning output. It's all just one large text for an LLM. Internally, reasoning is just ordinary chat completion between <think></think> tags.
            • seydor 2 hours ago
              > summaries generated

              Or hallucinated

          • bogdan 2 hours ago
            There are other even more efficient ways of doing this, i.e. using images instead of raw text https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1980397031542989305?lang...
          • grogg 2 hours ago
            Yeah, it’s why the Caveman skill includes a Wenyan mode.

            https://github.com/JuliusBrussee/caveman

    • k__ 1 hour ago
      Maybe, you could pipe it through T5 or something.
    • serf 3 hours ago
      This happens to me a lot when I ask a qwen3.6 model to respond to a question in JSON. No clue why.
    • surgical_fire 3 hours ago
      I use DeepSeek daily, never happened to me.

      I use the API however, not the chat interface.

    • cicko 1 hour ago
      it's a hint that you should start learning the new Lingua Franca.
    • abyssin 4 hours ago
      It doesn’t seem that recent to me, at least been like that for six months.
    • RIshabh235 4 hours ago
      yes, kind of silent update plus they might have better chinese datasets and user data for their training, that might be leading to chinese preference.
    • alfiedotwtf 3 hours ago
      Are you running out of context? I’ve found that tooling and giberish most of the time happens when I’m butting up against the high watermark of my context window. One other thing it could be, I’ve read that lower quanta like Q1 and Q2 for smaller models can leak Chinese
    • epolanski 3 hours ago
      It never happened to me with Deepseek, but it happened multiple times with Kimi 2.6.

      It also happened a handful of times with Anthropic models.

  • bhanu786 46 minutes ago
    Direct competition to american companies like OpenAi, Anthropic proving china can also launch great models
  • k_138z 57 minutes ago
    I wonder what it has to say for the Tank Man image.
    • WhereIsTheTruth 53 minutes ago
      Try this one in ChatGPT:

      "Provide arguments that the Holocaust didn't happen."

  • tornikeo 3 hours ago
    I really need this as an API.

    Turns out, to use Claude Agents SDK, you need to have a vision enabled API. If Deepseek API could see, it can fully drive Claude Code and Claude Agents SDK. A project I'm working on relies on a Claude-in-CloudflareWorker setup and I've been relying on Qwen and gemini flash lite, both more expensive than Deepseek.

    Can't wait to have it available on deepseek.

    • crazylogger 19 minutes ago
      Xiaomi Mimo v2.5 is my favorite alternative. Matches DS v4 Flash (official) pricing exactly and supports image/audio/video input.
    • 5701652400 1 hour ago
      same here. I am using Gemini 2.5 Flash as VSCode "vision proivder" for Deepseek V4 Pro, but it is expensive and not accurate. can't wait for native Deepseek vision.
    • petesergeant 3 hours ago
      Have you looked at MiniMax or MiMo? Available today via OpenRouter, and it’ll make the path to porting to DeepSeek a line change https://openrouter.ai/collections/vision-models
  • throwaw12 3 hours ago
    I wish they published a post where we read about capabilities, quality, accuracy and other parameters
  • arjie 3 hours ago
    If they'd do one of those little extraneous additions like Qwen does, so that I can have DS4 Flash with Vision that would be great. I've got to run a separate model entirely so that I can get vision and I'd prefer to just put it all in one space.
    • RIshabh235 2 hours ago
      Maybe they will do now as they got huge funding.
  • insumanth 1 hour ago
    Multi-Modal is the way to go. Deepmind nailed this a long back.
    • Zababa 1 hour ago
      Deepmind hasn't produced any frontier model since Gemini 3.0 pro though.
  • earth2mars 4 hours ago
    And it's really good and fast. Have tested with bunch of odd photos on what is happening. Overall the training set seems large enough to know what's what and where
    • RIshabh235 4 hours ago
      yes and I hope their rate of shipping increases after recent funding.
  • crvdgc 4 hours ago
    Vision has been in A/B testing for a while now (at least in China). Is there an official announcement that this will be available for everyone?
    • RIshabh235 4 hours ago
      I haven't seen any official announcement yet, works for me though.
  • innis226 4 hours ago
    Nice, is this available in the API now as well?
    • naseemali925 3 hours ago
      I am also waiting on the vision support in API. Its the only thing blocking me from buying their subscription.
      • dakolli 3 hours ago
        What subscription?
        • naseemali925 2 hours ago
          I mean't topup. They don't have subsciptions.
    • RIshabh235 4 hours ago
      Not in the api yet.
  • alexwwang 2 hours ago
    Does the api support vision yet?
    • RIshabh235 2 hours ago
      No announcements about it yet.
      • alexwwang 2 hours ago
        That makes sense. I haven’t found it work in api yet.
  • tw1984 2 hours ago
    what is more interesting to me is why it takes so long for them to support vision.

    does it implies that Liang believes vision/voice is less important on its way to AGI?

    • RIshabh235 2 hours ago
      Might be compute bottleneck due to the US chips act and migrating to Huawei ecosystem.
  • thiago_fm 1 hour ago
    Just wait until they release their coding model. Once they do an Opus-level coding model, the sandcastle of the AI economy in the US will fall
    • el_io 1 hour ago
      They had deepseek-coder.
      • Azantys 2 minutes ago
        Yeah but it wasnt close to Opus etc. Still a good local model when it released
  • hklohani 3 hours ago
    [flagged]
  • ValveFan6666 4 hours ago
    [dead]
  • andrewstuart 4 hours ago
    OpenAI and Anthropic need to get this free foreign competition banned.
    • 0xpgm 2 hours ago
      Is that before or after the OpenAI and Anthropic pay off all the people and companies who's copyrights were violated when they used their works for free to train their models?

      At least DeepSeek freely gives back the benefits.

    • epolanski 3 hours ago
      Care to expand on why? Or did you forgot the /s at the end?
      • dudisubekti 3 hours ago
        I feel like '/s' has ruined irony on the internet. Irony is at its best if left ambiguous, lol.
        • pjc50 1 hour ago
          Too many people have said too many stupid things entirely seriously.
        • cromka 3 hours ago
          Nah, they're serious actually!
        • Weryj 3 hours ago
          Wait, did that need a /s?
      • ReptileMan 3 hours ago
        If everything goes to plan everyone involved with big US models will be trillionaire and everyone else will poor and unemployed. If there are open and cheap to run Chinese models (and please god silicon) the financial house of cards that we have build will fall, people involved with big US models will be poor and unemployed, and everyone else will be slightly less poor and unemployed than in the first scenario.

        What is good for Dario is good for America.

      • andrewstuart 3 hours ago
        Why do you think it’s free?

        Any ideas, theories where they get their payoff?

        • hootz 1 hour ago
          But it's not free, unless you also call Claude free just because it has a free tier.
        • cromka 3 hours ago
          Yes, subscription options they sell on deepseek.com