DeepSeek Introduces Vision
135 points - today at 6:17 AM
SourceFor 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).
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.
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.
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.
QuantumNomad_
today at 9:22 AM
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?).
arcanemachiner
today at 9:10 AM
Much faster and better flow. Don't knock it til you've tried it.
perching_aix
today at 9:40 AM
[delayed]
throawayonthe
today at 8:59 AM
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
stranded22
today at 8:56 AM
Accessibility.
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?
Maybe, you could pipe it through T5 or something.
Well, it is a Chinese model, maybe it thinks better in Chinese?
Hà nzì can use 30%-40% fewer tokens than English. So, yes, it probably thinks better in Chinese.
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
today at 8:46 AM
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.
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.
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.
> summaries generated
Or hallucinated
it's a hint that you should start learning the new Lingua Franca.
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
today at 8:00 AM
I use DeepSeek daily, never happened to me.
I use the API however, not the chat interface.
It doesn’t seem that recent to me, at least been like that for six months.
RIshabh235
today at 7:06 AM
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
today at 7:39 AM
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
today at 7:18 AM
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.
insumanth
today at 9:21 AM
Multi-Modal is the way to go.
Deepmind nailed this a long back.
Deepmind hasn't produced any frontier model since Gemini 3.0 pro though.
throwaw12
today at 8:06 AM
I wish they published a post where we read about capabilities, quality, accuracy and other parameters
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.
5701652400
today at 9:15 AM
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.
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
today at 8:23 AM
Maybe they will do now as they got huge funding.
earth2mars
today at 7:02 AM
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
today at 7:08 AM
yes and I hope their rate of shipping increases after recent funding.
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
today at 7:05 AM
I haven't seen any official announcement yet, works for me though.
alexwwang
today at 8:47 AM
Does the api support vision yet?
RIshabh235
today at 8:57 AM
No announcements about it yet.
alexwwang
today at 8:59 AM
That makes sense. I haven’t found it work in api yet.
Nice, is this available in the API now as well?
naseemali925
today at 7:14 AM
I am also waiting on the vision support in API. Its the only thing blocking me from buying their subscription.
What subscription?
naseemali925
today at 8:53 AM
I mean't topup. They don't have subsciptions.
RIshabh235
today at 7:02 AM
Not in the api yet.
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
today at 9:08 AM
Might be compute bottleneck due to the US chips act and migrating to Huawei ecosystem.
thiago_fm
today at 9:17 AM
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
ValveFan6666
today at 6:56 AM
[dead]
andrewstuart
today at 7:12 AM
OpenAI and Anthropic need to get this free foreign competition banned.
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
today at 7:19 AM
Care to expand on why? Or did you forgot the /s at the end?
dudisubekti
today at 7:29 AM
I feel like '/s' has ruined irony on the internet. Irony is at its best if left ambiguous, lol.
Too many people have said too many stupid things entirely seriously.
Nah, they're serious actually!
Wait, did that need a /s?
ReptileMan
today at 7:47 AM
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
today at 7:57 AM
Why do you think it’s free?
Any ideas, theories where they get their payoff?
Yes, subscription options they sell on deepseek.com