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  • Hacker News
  • 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?
    by v9v
  • I've been using v4-flash without vision for this months — it's my go-to for code tasks. Now with vision, I'm wondering: if this model can do everything the text-only version does (plus see images), why keep the text-only one around?

    Is it just cost/latency? Or is there something text-only does better?

  • Congratulations! DeepSeek has finally gained eyes — the dark days are about to be behind us.
  • News announcement with benchmarks: https://api-docs.deepseek.com/news/news260821/
  • > 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)

  • 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.

  • 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.

  • 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.

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