DeepSeek to Open-Source AI Code Repositories, Pushing Transparency in AI Development

DeepSeek promises to share even more AI code in a rare step

Chinese AI sensation DeepSeek plans to release key codes and data to the public starting next week, an unusual step to share more of its core technology than rivals such as OpenAI have done. The 20-month-old startup, which surprised Silicon Valley with the sophistication of its AI models last month, plans to make its code repositories available to all developers and researchers. That allows anyone to download and build on or improve the code behind the well-regarded R1 or other platforms, it said in a post on X. With the move, DeepSeek is pushing harder on an open-source approach to AI development that's won more advocates since its models outperformed OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. competitors in benchmark tests. Companies such as Meta already make their models available to the public, allowing users to customize the platform for their own applications. OpenAI began as partially open source, though it's since retreated from that mission. But DeepSeek says it intends to go further by publicizing the underlying code, the data used to create it, and the way it develops and manages that code. It also potentially escalates a race between the US and China to develop ever-more advanced AI models. By making its coding secrets freely available, DeepSeek is helping to ensure wider adoption of its technology, which is already spurring concerns about security among governments from the US to Australia. "We're a tiny team exploring AGI. Starting next week, we'll be open-sourcing 5 repos, sharing our small but sincere progress with full transparency," DeepSeek announced on its X handle on Friday. A code and data repository is a digital storage space where the data and resources needed for training, running, and evaluating AI models are organized and managed. The Hangzhou-based startup said its technology has been fully tested, deployed and documented. DeepSeek's surprising progress has forced larger, more established rivals like Baidu Inc. to adopt the open-source framework. But global competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic still keep their AI models, repositories and data proprietary. Investors in the biggest US AI startups like Anthropic PBC and xAI have plowed tens of billions of dollars into the industry in the hope of a big payday. DeepSeek, which emerged out of a quantitative hedge fund run by founder Liang Wenfeng, has so far not revealed outside backing and could face less pressure to build a revenue model. "No ivory towers - just pure garage-energy and community-driven innovation," the startup posted on X.

DeepSeek promises to share even more AI code in a rare step

The 20-month-old startup, which surprised Silicon Valley with the sophistication of its AI models last month, plans to make its code repositories available to all developers and researchers. That allows anyone to download and build on or improve the code behind the well-regarded R1 or other platforms, it said in a post on X.Chinese AI sensation DeepSeek plans to release key codes and data to the public starting next week, an unusual step to share more of its core technology than rivals such as OpenAI have done. The 20-month-old startup, which surprised Silicon Valley with the sophistication of its AI models last month, plans to make its code repositories available to all developers and researchers. That allows anyone to download and build on or improve the code behind the well-regarded R1 or other platforms, it said in a post on X. With the move, DeepSeek is pushing harder on an open-source approach to AI development that's won more advocates since its models outperformed OpenAI and Meta Platforms Inc. competitors in benchmark tests. Companies such as Meta already make their models available to the public, allowing users to customize the platform for their own applications. OpenAI began as partially open source, though it's since retreated from that mission. But DeepSeek says it intends to go further by publicizing the underlying code, the data used to create it, and the way it develops and manages that code. It also potentially escalates a race between the US and China to develop ever-more advanced AI models. By making its coding secrets freely available, DeepSeek is helping to ensure wider adoption of its technology, which is already spurring concerns about security among governments from the US to Australia. "We're a tiny team exploring AGI. Starting next week, we'll be open-sourcing 5 repos, sharing our small but sincere progress with full transparency," DeepSeek announced on its X handle on Friday. A code and data repository is a digital storage space where the data and resources needed for training, running, and evaluating AI models are organized and managed. The Hangzhou-based startup said its technology has been fully tested, deployed and documented. DeepSeek's surprising progress has forced larger, more established rivals like Baidu Inc. to adopt the open-source framework. But global competitors like OpenAI and Anthropic still keep their AI models, repositories and data proprietary. Investors in the biggest US AI startups like Anthropic PBC and xAI have plowed tens of billions of dollars into the industry in the hope of a big payday. DeepSeek, which emerged out of a quantitative hedge fund run by founder Liang Wenfeng, has so far not revealed outside backing and could face less pressure to build a revenue model. "No ivory towers - just pure garage-energy and community-driven innovation," the startup posted on X.

DeepSeek invites users behind the curtain of its open source AI code

The Chinese startup, DeepSeek plans to become even more transparent about the technology behind its open-source AI models, such as its R1 reasoning model. The company detailed in a post on X on Friday that it will make several code repositories available to the public, starting next week. This will give developers and researchers a deeper understanding of the nuances of the key parts of DeepSeek's code. It is an especially bold move for a tech company. However, bold moves are already par for the course for DeepSeek, which entered the AI space as an industry disrupter. It has especially stood out because its models have performed as well, if not better than many of the top AI brands in the industry, such as OpenAI and Meta- that use proprietary technologies. Recommended Videos 🚀 Day 0: Warming up for #OpenSourceWeek! We're a tiny team @deepseek_ai exploring AGI. Starting next week, we'll be open-sourcing 5 repos, sharing our small but sincere progress with full transparency. These humble building blocks in our online service have been documented,... — DeepSeek (@deepseek_ai) February 21, 2025 "We're a tiny team exploring AGI. Starting next week, we'll be open-sourcing 5 repos, sharing our small but sincere progress with full transparency," DeepSeek said on X. By making its AI models open source, DeepSeek made its codes available for others for further development without charge. Now, the brand is giving the public access to get behind the veil of the original code that took the world by storm. This move has the potential to make DeepSeek's AI models even more popular, by making knowledge about the brand and its technologies more available and dispelling any concerns. The company said it plans to continue revealing more data after the initial code repository launch. The public will be able to see "every line of code, configuration file, and piece of data lives there together," the Cryptopolitan noted. According to Bloomberg, DeepSeek's effort to be more transparent may also aid the company in quelling various security concerns that have been raised by several government entities, including those in the U.S., South Korea, Australia, and Taiwan. Since DeepSeek's introduction into the AI space, several companies have either introduced or recommitted themselves to incorporating more open-source development into their AI technology. The Chinese brand aims to continue its current strategy. "As part of the open-source community, we believe that every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey...No ivory towers - just pure garage-energy and community-driven innovation," DeepSeek said.

DeepSeek to share some AI model code, doubling down on open source

BEIJING, Feb 21 (Reuters) - Chinese startup DeepSeek will make its models' code publicly available, it said on Friday, doubling down on its commitment to open-source artificial intelligence. The company said in a post on social media platform X that it will open source 5 code repositories next week, describing the move as "small but sincere progress" that it will share "with full transparency." "These humble building blocks in our online service have been documented, deployed and battle-tested in production." the post said. DeepSeek rattled the global AI industry last month when it released its open-source R1 reasoning model, which rivaled Western systems in performance while being developed at a lower cost. The company's commitment to open-source has distinguished it from most AI firms in China, which like their U.S. rivals lean towards closed-sourced models. DeepSeek's low-key founder Liang Wenfeng said in a rare interview with a Chinese media outlet last July that the firm did not prioritize commercializing its AI models and that there was soft power to be gained from open source. "Having others follow your innovation gives a great sense of accomplishment," Liang said in July. "In fact, open source is more of a cultural behavior than a commercial one, and contributing to it earns us respect" he added. The newly released open source code will provide infrastructure to support the AI models that DeepSeek has already publicly shared, building on top of those existing open source model frameworks. The announcement came after DeepSeek on Tuesday released a new algorithm called Native Sparse Attention (NSA), designed to make long-context training and inference more efficient. DeepSeek's user base exploded since last month. In China, it is the most popular chatbot service with 22.2 million daily active users as of January 11, surpassing Douban's 16.95 million users, according to Aicpb.com, a Chinese website that tracks AI products. Reporting by Liam Mo, Eduardo Baptista and Brenda Goh;Editing by Elaine Hardcastle Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence

DeepSeek Promises to Share Even More AI Code in a Rare Step

Chinese AI sensation DeepSeek plans to release key codes and data to the public starting next week, an unusual step to share more of its core technology than rivals such as OpenAI have done. The 20-month-old startup, which surprised Silicon Valley with the sophistication of its AI models last month, plans to make its code repositories available to all developers and researchers. That allows anyone to download and build on or improve the code behind the well-regarded R1 or other platforms, it said in a post on X.

DeepSeek to open-source parts of online services code | TechCrunch

Chinese AI lab DeepSeek plans to open-source portions of its online services' code as part of an "open source week" event next week. DeepSeek will open-source five code repositories that have been "documented, deployed and battle-tested in production," the company said in a post on X on Thursday. Code repositories are storage locations for software development assets, and typically contain source code as well as configuration files and project documentation. "As part of the open-source community, we believe that every line shared becomes collective momentum that accelerates the journey," the company wrote. "Daily unlocks are coming soon. No ivory towers -- just pure garage-energy and community-driven innovation." DeepSeek, which has a history of making its AI models openly available under permissive licenses, has lit a fire under AI incumbents like OpenAI. In recent social media posts, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman admitted DeepSeek has lessened OpenAI's technological lead, and said that OpenAI would consider open-sourcing more of its technology in the future.

DeepSeek Will Announce 5 Open-Source Repositories Starting Next Week

DeepSeek AI, the artificial intelligence (AI) lab based in China, announced on Friday that it will launch five open-source repositories starting next week. The company is calling it the 'open source week' and said on X, "We're a tiny team DeepSeek exploring AGI (Artificial General Intelligence). Starting next week, we'll be open-sourcing five repos, sharing our small but sincere progress with full transparency." Currently, the company has a collection of 14 open-source models and repositories on Hugging Face. Recently, the company released its DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-V3 models. These AI models offer state-of-the-art performance while being trained and deployed at a fraction of the cost of their competitors. Last month, NVIDIA's market cap dropped by around $589 billion in a single day, raising concerns about the amount of capital and computing resources needed to build powerful AI models. The DeepSeek-V3 used just 2048 NVIDIA H800 GPUs to achieve performance better than most open-source models. Andrej Karpathy, former OpenAI researcher, said the DeepSeek-V3's level of capability is "supposed to require clusters of closer to 16,000 GPUs". For instance, xAI's new Grok-3 has been trained on over 1 lakh NVIDIA GPUs, and Karpathy said it is slightly better than the DeepSeek-R1. It will be interesting to see DeepSeek's upcoming commitment to launch open-source projects. Furthermore, its previous attempts gained appreciation from many industry leaders. For instance, Yann LeCun, Meta's chief AI scientist, said that instead of viewing DeepSeek's success as China surpassing the United States, it would be better to interpret it as "open-source models surpassing proprietary ones". Moreover, many leading AI labs across the world are pushing for an open-source approach. Baidu, another Chinese tech giant, announced that it will release the source code for its Ernie 4.5 models. During the earnings call, Baidu's CEO, Robin Li, said, "One thing we learned from DeepSeek is that open-sourcing the best models can greatly help adoption. When the model is open source, people naturally want to try it out of curiosity, which helps drive broader adoption." OpenAI is also exploring the development of open-source models. In a recent interview with Sky News, CEO Sam Altman said, "I think we should probably open source somewhat more." Moreover, in a Reddit ask-me-anything session, he said, "I personally think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy."

DeepSeek goes beyond "open weights" AI with plans for source code release

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. Major models including Google's Gemma, Meta's Llama, and even older OpenAI releases like GPT2 have been released under this open weights structure. Those models also often release open source code covering the inference-time instructions run when responding to a query. It's currently unclear whether DeepSeek's planned open source release will also include the code the team used when training the model. That kind of training code is necessary to meet the Open Source Institute's formal definition of "Open Source AI", which was finalized last year after years of study. A truly open AI also must include "sufficiently detailed information about the data used to train the system so that a skilled person can build a substantially equivalent system," according to OSI. A fully open source release, including training code, can give researchers more visibility into how a model works at a core level, potentially revealing biases or limitations that are inherent to the model's architecture instead of its parameter weights. A full source release would also make it easier to reproduce a model from scratch, potentially with completely new training data, if necessary. Elon Musk's xAI released an open source version of Grok 1's inference-time code last March and recently promised to release an open source version of Grok 2 in the coming weeks. But the recent release of Grok 3 will remain proprietary and only available to X Premium subscribers for the time being, the company said. Earlier this month, HuggingFace released an open source clone of OpenAI's proprietary "Deep Research" feature mere hours after it was released. That clone relies on a closed-weights model at release "just because it worked well," Hugging Face's Aymeric Roucher told Ars Technica, but the source code's "open pipeline" can easily be switched to any open-weights model as needed.