DeepSeek just landed yet another punch in the arms race for AI’s price/performance ratio – and this punch has eyes. Hangzhou-based company DeepSeek announced the release of the DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp – an experimental multimodal variation of its star performer, the V4 Flash. While DeepSeek-V4-Flash could only process textual information, DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp can now process images and screenshots, effectively giving its star performer eyes.
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The most noteworthy part of the release is the framing of it by DeepSeek itself. In the release statement, DeepSeek claims that its experimental AI model “matches DeepSeek-V4-Flash in text capabilities, including agents, reasoning, and world knowledge,” and that when benchmarked as a multimodal agent, it “makes a major leap in terms of performance,” reaching a performance level “close to Opus-4.8,” the most advanced model from Anthropic’s.
The key words here are “close to,” and it should be taken into account before any winner is proclaimed. DeepSeek made eleven comparisons with Opus 4.8. The model beats Opus in three of those, outclassing it in DeepSWE, Agents’ Last Exam, and ZeroBench by about 1 to 1.6 points margin. In the remaining eight comparisons, it loses to Opus 4.8, and in at least one of the hardest ones, the difference amounts to double digits. This is definitely an impressive performance from the experimental multimodal extension, but it is not the model that is winning against Opus 4.8; rather, it is the one that is getting closer to it while losing in the majority of the comparisons.
Context is important here as well. Opus 4.8 is not some outdated model that DeepSeek is trying to take down. According to Anthropic’s deprecation page, Opus 4.8 is marked as Active – fully supported and there are no plans for retiring it until May 2027. This makes the Opus 4.8 one of only five Opus-tier models that are in the same category. Therefore, DeepSeek chose a living example to compare with. The point is that nothing has been released regarding the comparison of the latest Opus generation and DeepSeek is comparing itself to something that is somewhat old already.
Practically speaking, the new DeepSeek model supports JPEG, PNG, GIF and WebP formats and allows to upload up to 600 images within one request. It is quite an interesting upper limit for people who develop document and screenshot-based agents. DeepSeek also released 0.1.1 version of its agent harness with inbuilt support for the new model. Besides that, there is a Files API provided, which allows uploading an image once and referring to it multiple times using a file ID.
The underlying theme here is always going to be cost, just as it always seems to be for DeepSeek. According to the reports, the cost of running this model is reported to be around 99% cheaper than that of Opus 4.8, which is the actual news that is hidden within the benchmark table. Any model that performs less in eight out of eleven tests but costs a fraction of the price would certainly become very interesting to developers.
DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp is live on the company’s API platform now. Whether “close to Opus 4.8″ really means anything in terms of reliable operations of an agent, specifically designed for this purpose, is the question that needs to be answered through testing of this benchmark table.”
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