DeepSeek adds a Vision image-understanding mode to its chat

Category: AI
Status: developing
Sources: South China Morning Post, discussion
Summary: DeepSeek added a Vision mode in beta to its chat interface for image-understanding tasks, alongside its existing expert and flash modes. Reporting frames this as DeepSeek's first user-facing multimodal capability and ties it to the Chinese model price war. DeepSeek has previously shipped open-weight vision models (DeepSeek-VL, VL2, Janus, OCR), but a primary changelog for this chat feature was not published.
Why it matters: Native image input in DeepSeek's low-cost chat broadens the set of cheap multimodal options practitioners can evaluate.
Follow-up: Watch for a model card, API exposure, and pricing for the vision capability, and whether it is V4-based.