What is DeepSeek? Full Guide to DeepSeek LLM & DeepSeek Code (2025)
π Introduction
DeepSeek is a family of open-source large language models (LLMs) developed by DeepSeek AI, a research group focused on building competitive and transparent alternatives to proprietary models like GPT-4 and Gemini.
With DeepSeek-VL, DeepSeek-Coder, and DeepSeek-LLM, the organization has made waves in the AI open-source community, especially among developers looking for powerful models for coding, language, and vision tasks.
π’ Who Created DeepSeek?
DeepSeek AI is a Chinese AI research lab and startup that launched in 2023. It quickly gained attention for:
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Open-sourcing large transformer models
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Competing with GPT-4 in coding and math
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Focusing on multilingual and multimodal tasks
The lab is inspired by organizations like Hugging Face, Meta AI (LLaMA), and Mistral.
π DeepSeek Model Family (2025)
| Model | Type | Highlights |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek-LLM | Language Model | GPT-style general-purpose LLM |
| DeepSeek-Coder | Code LLM | Fine-tuned for software development |
| DeepSeek-VL | Vision-Language | Handles image + text inputs |
| DeepSeek-MoE | Mixture-of-Experts | Scalable & efficient expert routing |
π§ What is DeepSeek-LLM?
DeepSeek-LLM is a series of base and instruction-tuned models trained on trillions of tokens. Available in sizes from 1.3B to 67B parameters, it offers:
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High-quality reasoning and generation
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Open weights for research and commercial use
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Performance close to or better than LLaMA 2
π¦ Available on Hugging Face: deepseek-ai/deepseek-llm
π» What is DeepSeek-Coder?
DeepSeek Coder is a specialized model for coding and software development, trained on a vast corpus of public GitHub repositories.
Features:
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Supports 80+ programming languages
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Handles complex software engineering tasks
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Competitive with GPT-4 in code generation
Variants:
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DeepSeek-Coder-1.3B -
DeepSeek-Coder-6.7B -
DeepSeek-Coder-Instruct
π¦ Check: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/deepseek-coder
π§ What is DeepSeek-VL?
DeepSeek-VL (Vision Language) allows multimodal understandingβprocessing both text and images.
Use cases:
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Document QA with diagrams
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Image captioning
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OCR + NLP pipelines
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Visual Chatbots
Itβs positioned as an open alternative to GPT-4-Vision and Gemini Pro Vision.
π§ͺ Benchmarks & Performance
DeepSeek models score highly on:
| Benchmark | Score | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| MMLU | Near GPT-4 | Good general reasoning |
| HumanEval | 71β82% | Competitive coding |
| GSM8K | High | Strong in math |
| Multi-modal QA | 80%+ | VL model strength |
βοΈ How to Use DeepSeek in Python
Using transformers:
π Use Cases of DeepSeek
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π¨βπ» Code generation (DeepSeek-Coder)
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π§Ύ Multilingual text generation (DeepSeek-LLM)
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πΌοΈ Visual Q&A (DeepSeek-VL)
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π Private deployment for enterprises
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π« Research and education in NLP
π¦ Where to Access DeepSeek Models
You can find all models on:
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GitHub: https://github.com/deepseek-ai (Unofficial mirrors)
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Google Colab / HF Spaces demos
π Is DeepSeek Free?
Yes. DeepSeek models are:
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π Open-source under Apache 2.0 license
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β Commercially usable
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βοΈ Available to fine-tune or deploy on your own infrastructure
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