DeepSeek's smallpond: Bringing Distributed Computing to DuckDB

DeepSeek has made a lot of noise lately. Their R1 model, released in January 2025, outperformed competitors like OpenAI’s O1 at launch. But what truly set it apart was its highly efficient infrastructure—dramatically reducing costs while maintaining top-tier performance. Now, they're coming for data engineers. DeepSeek released a bunch of small repositories as independent code modules. Thomas Wolf, Co-founder and Chief of Product at HuggingFace shared some of his highlights, but we're going to focus on one particularly important project went that unmentioned—smallpond, a distributed compute framework built on DuckDB. DeepSeek is pushing DuckDB beyond its single-node roots with smallpond, a new, simple approach to distributed computing. First, having DeepSeek, a hot AI company, using DuckDB is a significant statement, and we'll understand why. Second, we'll dive into the repository itself, exploring their smart approach to enabling DuckDB as a distributed system, along with its limita ... Read full article.