DeepSeek has launched an experimental multimodal model called DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp, which it claims approaches the performance of Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.8 on various benchmarks. This release signifies DeepSeek’s continued efforts to enhance visual AI capabilities while maintaining lower costs compared to American competitors. The model was introduced on Friday, marking an important step in the company’s strategy to compete in the rapidly evolving AI landscape. The new model is a multimodal variant of DeepSeek’s existing V4-Flash text model. It preserves the original text functionalities, such as reasoning and general knowledge, while incorporating image understanding features. According to DeepSeek’s benchmarks, the DeepSeek-V4-Flash-Vision-Exp model significantly narrows the performance gap with Opus 4.8. For instance, on the ApexBench, the new model scored 36.5 at Pass@1, while Opus 4.8 achieved 39.4.

Full report : DeepSeek unveils an experimental multimodal version of its V4 Flash model, saying it nears the performance of Anthropic’s Opus 4.8 on multimodal agentic tests.