DeepSeek & open models
that run on your machine
Until recently, powerful AI lived only in the clouds of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google. DeepSeek and other open models changed the equation: GPT-level models — free, open, and running on your own machine. In this guide: what makes DeepSeek special, how to run a model locally with Ollama, the open-model map, and when it beats the cloud API.
On the prices on this page: vendor pricing changes often, and these figures are not checked automatically against the vendor's own pricing page. Treat them as an order of magnitude and confirm the current price before deciding.
What DeepSeek is and why everyone talked about it
DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab that released a family of open models that shook the industry. Two models stood out: DeepSeek-V3 — a strong general chat model, andDeepSeek-R1 — a reasoning reasoning model that thinks before it answers, at the level of the closed competitors, but at a fraction of the cost and with open weights for everyone.
The news was not just the performance, but the license and price: you can download the model, run it on your own server, fine-tune it, and build a product on it — without paying any vendor and without sending data out. This is what made 2026 the year "open model" became a serious business option, not just an experiment.
DeepSeek uses a Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture — only a small part of the parameters is active per query, which dramatically lowers the inference cost. And R1 was trained withReinforcement Learning to learn to "think out loud" (chain-of-thought) — which is why it is strong at math, code and logic.
Why an open model at all — 4 advantages
Running locally — Ollama and LM Studio
The good news: you do not need to be an ML engineer to run an open model. Two tools made it as simple as installing an app:
Ollama — the fast CLI way
Ollama is the most popular tool for running models locally. One command downloads and runs a model, and exposes an OpenAI-compatible API you can connect any app to:
# install (Mac/Linux) — one line
curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh
# download and run a model — one command
ollama run deepseek-r1:7b
# now there is a local OpenAI-compatible API at:
# http://localhost:11434/v1LM Studio — a GUI for those who prefer it
LM Studio is a desktop app with a graphical interface: you search a catalog for a model, download it with a click, and chat with it — or start a local API server. Perfect for those who dislike the terminal, and for quickly trying several models.
Open models come incompressed versions (quantized) — the GGUF format with different precision levels (Q4, Q5, Q8). Q4 saves memory dramatically with minimal quality loss. This is what lets you run a 7B–14B model on a regular laptop. Rule of thumb: start with Q4_K_M.
The 2026 open-model map
DeepSeek is not alone. Here are the leading open-model families and what each is good at:
| Family | By | Strength |
|---|---|---|
| DeepSeek (V3 / R1) | DeepSeek | Reasoning, code, cost |
| Qwen | Alibaba | Code, multilingual, general |
| Llama | Meta | Most common in enterprises |
| Gemma | Small and efficient, on-device | |
| Mistral | Mistral AI | European, multilingual |
You can find them all onHugging Face and run them through Ollama. Note the size: a number like 7b or 70b is the number of parameters (in billions) — the larger it is, the smarter, but the more memory it needs.
How much hardware you really need
| Model size | Memory (RAM/VRAM) | Suits |
|---|---|---|
| 1B–3B | 4–8GB | A laptop, simple tasks |
| 7B–8B | 8–16GB | Mac M-series, everyday use |
| 14B–32B | 16–32GB | A workstation, a strong GPU |
| 70B+ | 48GB+ | A server / cloud GPU |
No suitable hardware? You can run the same open models through cloud inference providers (Together, Groq, Fireworks, OpenRouter) — pay per use, without managing a server, and still enjoy the flexibility of the open model.
Open vs closed — when to choose which
| Need | Open model (DeepSeek/Qwen) | Closed API (GPT/Claude) |
|---|---|---|
| Data privacy | ✓ wins | depends on vendor |
| Maximum quality | very close | ✓ still leads |
| Cost at high volume | ✓ cheaper | gets expensive |
| Setup speed | requires setup | ✓ instant |
"Open" does not always mean "allowed for any commercial use". Each family has its own license (Apache 2.0, the Llama license, and more) — read it before you build a product. And if you use DeepSeek's cloud API (as opposed to running locally), note that the data goes to servers in China; for local runs this is not an issue.