Last month, DeepSeek turned the AI world on its head with the release of a new, competitive simulated reasoning model that was free to download and use under an MIT license. Now, the company is preparing to make the underlying code behind that model more accessible, promising to release five open source repos starting next week.
In a social media post late Thursday, DeepSeek said the daily releases it is planning for its "Open Source Week" would provide visibility into "these humble building blocks in our online service [that] have been documented, deployed and battle-tested in production. As part of the open-source community, we believe that every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey."
While DeepSeek has been very non-specific about just what kind of code it will be sharing, an accompanying GitHub page for "DeepSeek Open Infra" promises the coming releases will cover "code that moved our tiny moonshot forward" and share "our small-but-sincere progress with full transparency." The page also refers back to a 2024 paper detailing DeepSeek's training architecture and software stack.
The move threatens to widen the contrast between DeepSeek and OpenAI, whose market-leading ChatGPT models remain completely proprietary, making their inner workings opaque to outside users and researchers. The open source release could also help provide wider and easier access to DeepSeek even as its mobile app is facing international restrictions over privacy concerns.
How open is open?
DeepSeek's initial model release already included so-called "open weights" access to the underlying data representing the strength of the connections between the model's billions of simulated neurons. That kind of release allows end users to easily fine-tune those model parameters with additional training data for more targeted purposes.