Can you run it?
This page is a projection of the one entry record, the Reliability and Data control factors that Implement covers. The full verdict is set by all four factors together, floor-weighted so the weakest caps the whole.
- AssessUse & modify + Transparency
- ImplementData control + Reliability
- UseReliability
- SupportTransparency
Install & run
Download the safetensors from the verified deepseek-ai organisation on Hugging Face and
serve with vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, or Ollama. Pin the exact revision and verify checksums.
Deploy the Chat variant for assistant use - the Base variant is an un-tuned
completion model. Note the weight licence is the DeepSeek License Agreement, not MIT.
Hardware & VRAM requirements
A 671B-total / 37B-active MoE: even quantized the weights are large, so a full-fidelity deployment is a multi-GPU / multi-node exercise. The community quantization ecosystem (GGUF and lower-bit) makes reduced-precision serving tractable, at the usual quality trade-off. 128K context adds KV-cache pressure at long inputs.
Serving stacks
First-class support across vLLM, SGLang, llama.cpp, and Ollama.
Safe-deployment controls & Deployment Ceiling
Deployment Ceiling: T2 (conditional). First, honour the DeepSeek License use restrictions - they are a binding condition of the grant, not optional guidance. Then, as with the rest of the family: supply your own input/output guardrails and a guard model, add prompt-injection defences and treat retrieved/tool content as untrusted for agentic use, and account for China-aligned topic filtering. Never deploy the Base variant unwrapped.
Available quantizations
An extensive community quantization ecosystem circulates. Redistribution of these derivatives must carry the DeepSeek License field-of-use restrictions (not MIT terms) - verify provenance and prefer hosts you already trust.
Fine-tuning & adaptation
The licence permits fine-tuning and derivatives, but they inherit the field-of-use restrictions. The training data and code are closed, so there is no from-scratch reproduction - adaptation of the released weights is possible within the licence's limits.
API / OpenAI-compatible integration
Serve the Chat variant behind vLLM's or SGLang's OpenAI-compatible endpoint and point your existing client at it - a standard instruct interface.
How this scores
The ownership factors this domain covers, drawn from the one entry record.
ReliabilityIs it reliable and good enough for the job?
StrongPerformance 4, operational 5 and safety 3: a strong model with first-class serving; all three at or above 3 with two at or above 4, so reliability is strong. The caveat is the absence of a first-party guard model (and the un-tuned Base variant).
Doesn't extract your dataDoes running it keep your knowledge and data yours?
StrongSelf-hosted, the weights run entirely on your own infrastructure with no telemetry and an irrevocable grant, so your data stays yours and access cannot be clawed back. (The hosted DeepSeek API is a separate matter with its own data terms.)
Sources
The same evidence records as the entry sheet. Read means the text was verified; unverified means it is known to exist but not yet read.