Simon Willison’s Weblog

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3-0324. Chinese AI lab DeepSeek just released the latest version of their enormous DeepSeek v3 model, baking the release date into the name DeepSeek-V3-0324.

The license is MIT (that's new - previous DeepSeek v3 had a custom license), the README is empty and the release adds up a to a total of 641 GB of files, mostly of the form model-00035-of-000163.safetensors.

The model only came out a few hours ago and MLX developer Awni Hannun already has it running at >20 tokens/second on a 512GB M3 Ultra Mac Studio ($9,499 of ostensibly consumer-grade hardware) via mlx-lm and this mlx-community/DeepSeek-V3-0324-4bit 4bit quantization, which reduces the on-disk size to 352 GB.

I think that means if you have that machine you can run it with my llm-mlx plugin like this, but I've not tried myself!

llm mlx download-model mlx-community/DeepSeek-V3-0324-4bit
llm chat -m mlx-community/DeepSeek-V3-0324-4bit

The new model is also listed on OpenRouter. You can try a chat at openrouter.ai/chat?models=deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3-0324:free.

Here's what the chat interface gave me for "Generate an SVG of a pelican riding a bicycle":

I have two API keys with OpenRouter - one of them worked with the model, the other gave me a No endpoints found matching your data policy error - I think because I had a setting on that key disallowing models from training on my activity. The key that worked was a free key with no attached billing credentials.

For my working API key the llm-openrouter plugin let me run a prompt like this:

llm install llm-openrouter
llm keys set openrouter
# Paste key here
llm -m openrouter/deepseek/deepseek-chat-v3-0324:free "best fact about a pelican"

Here's that "best fact" - the terminal output included Markdown and an emoji combo, here that's rendered.

One of the most fascinating facts about pelicans is their unique throat pouch, called a gular sac, which can hold up to 3 gallons (11 liters) of water—three times more than their stomach!

Here’s why it’s amazing:
- Fishing Tool: They use it like a net to scoop up fish, then drain the water before swallowing.
- Cooling Mechanism: On hot days, pelicans flutter the pouch to stay cool by evaporating water.
- Built-in "Shopping Cart": Some species even use it to carry food back to their chicks.

Bonus fact: Pelicans often fish cooperatively, herding fish into shallow water for an easy catch.

Would you like more cool pelican facts? 🐦🌊

In putting this post together I got Claude to build me this new tool for finding the total on-disk size of a Hugging Face repository, which is available in their API but not currently displayed on their website.

Update: Here's a notable independent benchmark from Paul Gauthier:

DeepSeek's new V3 scored 55% on aider's polyglot benchmark, significantly improving over the prior version. It's the #2 non-thinking/reasoning model, behind only Sonnet 3.7. V3 is competitive with thinking models like R1 & o3-mini.

# 24th March 2025, 3:04 pm / llm-release, hugging-face, generative-ai, deepseek, ai, llms, mlx, llm, ai-assisted-programming, tools, pelican-riding-a-bicycle, openrouter

llm-openrouter 0.4. I found out this morning that OpenRouter include support for a number of (rate-limited) free API models.

I occasionally run workshops on top of LLMs (like this one) and being able to provide students with a quick way to obtain an API key against models where they don't have to setup billing is really valuable to me!

This inspired me to upgrade my existing llm-openrouter plugin, and in doing so I closed out a bunch of open feature requests.

Consider this post the annotated release notes:

• LLM schema support for OpenRouter models that support structured output. #23

I'm trying to get support for LLM's new schema feature into as many plugins as possible.

OpenRouter's OpenAI-compatible API includes support for the response_format structured content option, but with an important caveat: it only works for some models, and if you try to use it on others it is silently ignored.

I filed an issue with OpenRouter requesting they include schema support in their machine-readable model index. For the moment LLM will let you specify schemas for unsupported models and will ignore them entirely, which isn't ideal.

• llm openrouter key command displays information about your current API key. #24

Useful for debugging and checking the details of your key's rate limit.

• llm -m ... -o online 1 enables web search grounding against any model, powered by Exa. #25

OpenRouter apparently make this feature available to every one of their supported models! They're using new-to-me Exa to power this feature, an AI-focused search engine startup who appear to have built their own index with their own crawlers (according to their FAQ). This feature is currently priced by OpenRouter at $4 per 1000 results, and since 5 results are returned for every prompt that's 2 cents per prompt.

• llm openrouter models command for listing details of the OpenRouter models, including a --json option to get JSON and a --free option to filter for just the free models. #26

This offers a neat way to list the available models. There are examples of the output in the comments on the issue.

• New option to specify custom provider routing: -o provider '{JSON here}'. #17

Part of OpenRouter's USP is that it can route prompts to different providers depending on factors like latency, cost or as a fallback if your first choice is unavailable - great for if you are using open weight models like Llama which are hosted by competing companies.

The options they provide for routing are very thorough - I had initially hoped to provide a set of CLI options that covered all of these bases, but I decided instead to reuse their JSON format and forward those options directly on to the model.

# 10th March 2025, 9:40 pm / llm, projects, plugins, annotated-release-notes, generative-ai, ai, llms, openrouter

llm-openrouter 0.3. New release of my llm-openrouter plugin, which allows LLM to access models hosted by OpenRouter.

Quoting the release notes:

• Enable image attachments for models that support images. Thanks, Adam Montgomery. #12
• Provide async model access. #15
• Fix documentation to list correct LLM_OPENROUTER_KEY environment variable. #10

# 8th December 2024, 11:56 pm / llm, releases, plugins, generative-ai, ai, llms, openrouter