Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has introduced its latest creation, DeepSeek-V3, an ultra-large open-source AI model boasting 671 billion parameters. Released under the company’s license via Hugging Face, the new model demonstrates exceptional performance, outperforming leading open models like Meta’s Llama-3.1 and Alibaba’s Qwen, and closely rivaling closed-source models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude 3.5.
DeepSeek, initially established as a project under High-Flyer Capital Management, has consistently pursued the development of advanced open-source technologies. The company sees DeepSeek-V3 as a significant step toward achieving artificial general intelligence (AGI)—an AI capable of mastering human intellectual tasks.
Advanced Architecture and Efficiency
DeepSeek-V3’s core design utilizes a mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture, activating just 37 billion of its 671 billion parameters for any given task. This enables robust task performance while maintaining efficiency in training and inference. Further innovations include an auxiliary loss-free load-balancing strategy, ensuring balanced use of the model’s neural networks, and multi-token prediction (MTP), which triples generation speed to 60 tokens per second.
During training, DeepSeek-V3 processed 14.8 trillion diverse tokens, extending context lengths to 128,000 tokens in a two-stage process. Post-training refinements included supervised fine-tuning and reinforcement learning, aligning the model with human preferences while preserving a balance between accuracy and generation length.
The model’s development cost totaled $5.57 million, leveraging multiple optimizations, such as the FP8 mixed precision training framework and DualPipe parallelism. In contrast, similar projects like Llama-3.1 required over $500 million, highlighting DeepSeek-V3’s cost-efficiency.
Benchmarking Excellence
DeepSeek’s benchmarks reveal DeepSeek-V3 as the strongest open-source AI model currently available. It outperformed open counterparts Llama-3.1-405B and Qwen 2.5-72B and rivaled closed-source models like GPT-4o on most tasks. Notably, its performance on Chinese and math-focused benchmarks was unmatched, scoring 90.2 on Math-500, with Qwen trailing at 80.
However, Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 maintained an edge in specific tasks like MMLU-Pro and SWE Verified, leaving room for future advancements in open-source AI.
The release of DeepSeek-V3 underscores the growing parity between open and closed-source AI models, fostering competition and reducing reliance on monopolistic players. The model is accessible under DeepSeek’s license on GitHub, with an API available for enterprises at promotional pricing until February 8.
DeepSeek-V3’s impressive performance and affordability promise to accelerate innovation in AI development, offering enterprises versatile tools to enhance their AI-driven solutions.
Featured image courtesy of Open Access Government
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