Chinese AI company Deepseek has released V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, an experimental multimodal model that adds image understanding to its text capabilities. On Deepseek's own benchmarks, the model nearly matches Opus 4.8 on agent tasks.
Deepseek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp extends Deepseek-V4-Flash with image processing while keeping the base model's text performance in reasoning and world knowledge, Deepseek says. On the company's internal multimodal agent benchmarks, the vision variant scores close to Opus 4.8.
Deepseek is targeting visual agent workflows #
Deepseek is positioning the model for agent-based applications. It's designed to work with different agent frameworks and combine visual understanding with tool use. In practice, it can describe images, extract text from screenshots, and analyze diagrams. It handles JPEG, PNG, GIF, and WebP, and determines the format from actual file content rather than the filename or declared MIME type, per the API docs.
The model works with OpenAI's Chat Completions and Responses APIs and Anthropic's Messages endpoint. Deepseek also released version 0.1.1 of its Harness framework, which supports the new model out of the box.
Pricing and image limits #
There are three ways to send images to the model. Developers can embed them directly with Base64 encoding, point to publicly accessible URLs (up to 32 MiB), or use the new, free Files API. The Files API lets you upload a file once and reference it by ID across multiple requests, with a size limit of 64 MiB.
An optional "detail" field downscales images to 512 x 512 pixels, saving tokens when fine visual detail isn't needed. The model automatically normalizes images to roughly 800 x 800 pixels depending on the aspect ratio before processing. Regardless of original resolution, each image costs at most 384 tokens. Pricing follows V4-Flash rates.
A single request can include up to 600 images. Max edge length is 8,192 pixels per side, but that drops to 4,096 pixels once a request contains 15 or more images. Images can only go in user messages.
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