Where can I download DeepSeek-V3-Lite?

[wangdongxuking61]

It seems to be an internally used model. Can it be shared publicly?

[Advait251206]

There is no officially released model called “DeepSeek-V3-Lite” available for public download.

As of now:

• The official releases are:
  • :contentReference[oaicite:0]{index=0} (full MoE model)
  • Variants like distilled / quantized community versions (created by third parties)

But “V3-Lite” is not an official checkpoint from DeepSeek.

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Where you can actually download DeepSeek-V3

1. Official model weights

The full model is available on Hugging Face:

• https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3 :contentReference[oaicite:1]{index=1}

This includes:

• Base model
• Full V3 MoE checkpoint (very large, ~600GB+ scale in full precision)

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2. What people call “Lite” versions

Since V3 is extremely large (MoE ~671B total parameters), the community often creates:

A. Quantized versions (most common “lite” substitute)

• 4-bit / 3-bit / 2-bit GGUF builds
• AWQ / GPTQ compressed variants
• Can run on single or dual high-memory GPUs

These are NOT official, but widely used.

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B. Distilled models

Sometimes developers distill V3 into:

• 7B / 14B / 32B dense models
• These are separate architectures, not V3 itself

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3. Why “V3-Lite” does not exist (officially)

:contentReference[oaicite:2]{index=2} has not released a “lite” version because:

• V3 is a Mixture-of-Experts model
• It is already optimized (only ~37B active per token)
• Smaller “lite” versions would require retraining or distillation

So instead, the ecosystem relies on:

• Quantization
• Distillation by third parties

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4. Recommended alternatives if you want “lite-like” usage

If your goal is easier local usage:

Option 1 — Quantized DeepSeek-V3

• 4-bit / 3-bit versions (Unsloth, GGUF, AWQ)
• Much lower VRAM requirement

Option 2 — Smaller DeepSeek models

• DeepSeek-R1-Distill (7B / 14B / 32B variants)
• Much easier to run locally

Option 3 — Hosted API

• Use DeepSeek’s official API instead of local inference

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5. Conclusion

• ❌ DeepSeek-V3-Lite does NOT exist officially
• ✔ Only DeepSeek-V3 full model is officially released
• ✔ “Lite” versions are community quantizations or distilled models
• ✔ Best practical substitute = quantized V3 or R1-distilled models

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