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DeepSeek V3

DeepSeekLarge Language ModelOpen Source

Powerful open-source MoE model with 671B total parameters. Known for exceptional cost-efficiency and competitive performance.

Abilities

Text GenerationCode GenerationReasoningMathFunction CallingMultilingual

Use Cases

ChatbotCoding AssistantData AnalysisResearch

Available in Tools

DeepSeek Chathttps://chat.deepseek.com
Cursorhttps://cursor.com
Continue (IDE)https://continue.dev

Availability

APIhttps://platform.deepseek.com
DeepSeek Chathttps://chat.deepseek.com
Hugging Facehttps://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3
Self-hosted

How to Use

Use the DeepSeek API (OpenAI-compatible) or download from Hugging Face. Easy migration from OpenAI.

Pros

  • Fully open source with MIT license — most permissive license among frontier models
  • Incredibly cheap API — $0.27/1M input is 10x cheaper than GPT-4o
  • Strong coding and math — competitive with GPT-4o on programming benchmarks
  • OpenAI-compatible API — switch from OpenAI with a one-line URL change
  • MoE efficiency — only 37B active per token despite 671B total

Cons

  • Self-hosting requires massive compute (8x A100 80GB minimum) — impractical for most
  • Chinese company — potential data jurisdiction and regulatory concerns for some enterprises
  • API availability issues during high demand — rate limits and outages reported
  • Less refined instruction following compared to Claude — more prone to verbosity
  • Smaller Western community — most documentation and discussion in Chinese

What to Use It For

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Perfect For

Cost-sensitive production APIs

At $0.27/1M input tokens it is 10x cheaper than GPT-4o with competitive quality

OpenAI-to-DeepSeek migration

OpenAI-compatible API means switching requires only a one-line URL change in your code

Open-source research

MIT license with full model weights available — maximum freedom for research and experimentation

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Good For

Coding and math tasks

Competitive with GPT-4o on programming and math benchmarks at a fraction of the cost

General chat applications

Strong conversational ability with MoE efficiency keeping costs low for chat workloads

warning

Not Recommended

Enterprise needing Western data jurisdiction

Chinese company — data jurisdiction and regulatory concerns for compliance-sensitive organizations

Try instead: Claude Sonnet 4, GPT-4o

Self-hosting without massive GPU cluster

671B total parameters require at minimum 8x A100 80GB — impractical for most organizations

Try instead: Llama 3.3 70B

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Do Not Use For

Reliability-critical production systems

API has documented availability issues during high demand — rate limits and outages can disrupt service

Try instead: GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet 4

On-device deployment

671B model is far too large for any edge or consumer device — even quantized versions are impractical

Try instead: Phi-4

Technical Details

Pricing$0.27 / 1M input, $1.10 / 1M output
Parameters671B total (37B active)
detail.contextWindow128K tokens
LicenseMIT

Links

language Website description API Documentation code Repository