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DeepSeek General (V3)

DeepSeek General is DeepSeek's general-purpose chat model line, headlined by DeepSeek-V3 and its successors — separate from the dedicated DeepSeek-R1 reasoning models. It ranks #9 in usage share at roughly 14.3%, offering strong all-around performance on everyday non-reasoning tasks like writing, summarizing, and coding. Like the rest of DeepSeek's lineup, it's fully open-weight and dramatically cheaper to run than closed-source models of comparable quality.

Quick facts
Made by: DeepSeek
Access: Open-weight, self-hostable (Ollama, vLLM, Hugging Face) + a low-cost hosted API
Context window: ~64K–128K tokens depending on version
Strengths: Fast everyday chat, writing, summarization, and coding at a very low cost per token
Primary use case: General-purpose chat and coding assistant for high-volume, cost-sensitive applications
Jump to: ExampleGetting startedBest for

Example

Run it locally with Ollama, or call the hosted API which uses the same request format as OpenAI's chat completions endpoint.

# run locally with Ollama
ollama run deepseek-v3
from openai import OpenAI

client = OpenAI(
    api_key="YOUR_API_KEY",
    base_url="https://api.deepseek.com"
)

response = client.chat.completions.create(
    model="deepseek-chat",
    messages=[{"role": "user", "content": "Summarize this changelog into 3 bullet points."}]
)

print(response.choices[0].message.content)

Getting started

Sign up for a DeepSeek platform API key, install the OpenAI SDK (it's fully compatible), and point the base URL at DeepSeek.

# 1. sign up and grab an API key at platform.deepseek.com

# 2. install the OpenAI-compatible SDK
pip install openai

# 3. set your key
export DEEPSEEK_API_KEY="your-key-here"
Best for: Teams running high-volume everyday tasks — chat support, content drafting, code completion — where DeepSeek's low per-token cost makes it far cheaper to scale than a premium closed-source model of similar quality.