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Is DeepSeek AI open source?
Saturday, 8 March 2025DEEPSEEK
The question of whether DeepSeek AI is open source is crucial for researchers, developers, and organizations looking to leverage advanced artificial intelligence technologies. This document provides a detailed and up-to-date answer, exploring the availability of DeepSeek's models, licensing, and accessibility for public use.
Understanding Open Source in the Context of AI
Before diving into DeepSeek AI specifically, it's essential to define what "open source" means within the AI realm. In the context of software, "open source" typically refers to software whose source code is publicly available, often under a license that allows users to view, modify, and distribute the software for various purposes, including commercial use. This transparency and collaborative nature are cornerstones of the open-source movement.
In AI, this can apply to several components: the AI model's architecture, the pre-trained weights, the training code, and associated datasets. An AI system is considered genuinely open source if these components are released under a permissive license that enables broad access and modification.
The Current Status of DeepSeek AI: A Blend of Open and Proprietary Elements
As of late 2024 and early 2025 (and based on publicly available information to date), DeepSeek AI is NOT entirely open source. However, the situation is nuanced, and DeepSeek AI adopts a hybrid approach.
Specifically, several DeepSeek AI models *are* released with open access licensing for research and commercial usage. Examples include:
- DeepSeek Coder: Released as an open-source coding LLM, excelling at both code completion and generation in a multiligual capacity. Its key is its long context window and its open availability on GitHub.
- DeepSeek Math: Released with permissive licensing to be a powerful open weight LLM tailored for mathematically grounded coding practices.
- V2 versions of Language Models: Versions released recently (January 2025) boast improvements that come from novel architecture, more token data sets for training and optimized GPU inferencing times to improve operational efficiency and minimize costs. It is expected, in accordance with previous behavior by DeepSeek, for this to come out open weight as well, and is considered under the open access realm.
Conversely, parts of the tech architecture are still unavailable or unlicenced for open source usage at time of writing.
Understanding The Proprietary aspects of the platform include
- The Core Platform & infrastructure The overall system which hosts the deep-learning architectures and code which serves the models runs from the internal IP of DeepSeek- it would be infeasible to expose these details and still mainting business operations given the cost for implementation, support, usage or otherwise running large distributed software applications for commercial availability for usage.
- Underlying technologies & tools In many cases, closed tools, proprietary dataset-curated tooling that generates large corpus-sized training datasets can contribute largely to creating deep learing systems; in most use-cases, such investments do not yield viable business potential due to lack of transfer of benefits and lack of widespread usability on diverse types of products, solutions and business value offerings.
Exploring Available DeepSeek AI Models and Licenses
While not everything is open source, DeepSeek AI has released certain models under permissive licenses that allow both research and commercial applications. This indicates a commitment to contributing to the broader AI community. The precise models available and the specific licenses they fall under are continually evolving, so developers are instructed to routinely consult official announcements on the DeepSeek AI website and accompanying Github repository.
The GitHub repository remains the singular and single greatest, most-upto-date accurate source of what constitutes which of DeepSeekAI tools and components exist in terms of their offerings.
Benefits and Considerations of Using DeepSeek AI Models
DeepSeek AI offers advantages like state-of-the-art performance in specific areas.
Given Deepseek focuses strongly on areas related to generating mathematical algorithms via coding with an orientation towards strong multilingual availability. When deciding if to use it, however one needs to weigh:
- Licensing restrictions from potentially some proprietary and unknown dependencies of proprietary algorithms
- Business scalability considerations of commercial products being hosted with deep learning tools in terms of latency or scaling needs of a platform/ solution/ offering based around generating the DeepSeek platform output.
Monitoring Future Developments
The landscape of AI is constantly changing. As DeepSeek AI continues to develop, it may adopt new approaches to open sourcing its technologies. Staying informed requires regularly checking:
- DeepSeek AI's official website and blog for announcements.
- Academic publications and AI research communities.
- Relevant GitHub repositories.
Conclusion
DeepSeek AI is not completely open source, offering a combination of openly accessible models alongside proprietary technologies. The presence of readily available open models released over GitHub does speak, and indicate toward the corporate direction the business moves- making the company stand with competitors who have started out, too with close walled offerings. Developers are urged to analyze current conditions that may have the need for business value offerings that align directly with code completion. As its models evolve and new announcements happen it becomes more critically important to revalidate business scalability criteria and licensing usage.
Open Source Licensing Availability 
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