DeepSeek’s Partial Open-Source Strategy | What’s Behind the AI Inference Engine?

Chinese AI startup DeepSeek has just taken a semi-bold step into the open-source world. While they aren’t giving away the entire playbook, they’ve confirmed they’ll be sharing some key parts of the tech behind how their AI models actually run—more specifically, their internal inference engine.

For anyone not knee-deep in AI jargon, inference is basically the moment an AI model stops learning and starts doing—spitting out text, images, or code based on what it has learned. And getting this process to be faster and more efficient is a big deal in the world of large language models (LLMs).

So, What’s DeepSeek Actually Sharing?

The company said its inference engine—a custom version of an open-source library called vLLM—has been crucial in speeding up both training and deployment for models like DeepSeek-V3 and DeepSeek-R1. While they aren’t open-sourcing the entire thing, they are releasing the design improvements and implementation tweaks they’ve made. These will be shared as separate, reusable libraries that developers can plug into their own projects.

In a note on Hugging Face (a popular hub for open-source AI models), one of DeepSeek’s researchers wrote:

“We want to give back to the community as much as we can. We are deeply grateful for the open-source ecosystem, without which our progress toward AGI [artificial general intelligence] would not be possible.”

Why Not Just Open-Source the Whole Thing?

It’s not that DeepSeek doesn’t want to—there are just a bunch of real-world issues in the way. The team pointed to things like limited bandwidth for maintenance, infrastructure restrictions, and a pretty tangled, heavily customized codebase. So instead of dropping the whole engine on GitHub, they’re being selective—sharing what they can, when they can, in ways that are actually useful to others.

This builds on their “Open-Source Week” from earlier this year, where they made parts of their AI models and tools publicly available. It’s all part of a bigger plan to contribute more to the open-source scene while still keeping some parts of the business proprietary.

Why This Matters

In an industry where most major players keep their tech tightly under wraps, even partial transparency from a company like DeepSeek is a big deal. It signals a shift toward a slightly more collaborative AI landscape—one where sharing knowledge is starting to matter as much as shipping products.

It’s also a smart move for DeepSeek. By supporting the broader developer community and being vocal about how they’re optimizing AI performance, they’re building trust and relevance in a space that’s moving fast—and getting more competitive by the day.

So no, they’re not throwing open every door just yet. But in a field where secrecy is the norm, even cracking a window is worth talking about.