# DeepSeek V3 (671B)

> DeepSeek's flagship template kicked off the recent wave of large open MoE models.

| Property | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Lab | DeepSeek (China) |
| Released | 2024-12-26 |
| Decoder type | Sparse MoE |
| Family | Sparse MoE |
| Scale | 671B total, 37B active (5.5% active) |
| Context window | 128,000 tokens |
| Attention | MLA |
| Layer mix | 61 MLA |
| KV cache / token (bf16) | 68.6 KiB (Low) |
| License | DeepSeek License Agreement v1.0 |

**Key detail:** Uses a dense prefix, shared expert, and MTP-1 objective to keep a very large model practical.

## Architecture concepts

- [Multi-Head Latent Attention (MLA)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/mla.md): Keys and values are compressed into a small latent vector that is cached instead of full K/V.
- [Mixture of Experts (MoE)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/moe.md): Many feed-forward experts, but a router sends each token to only a few of them.
- [Multi-Token Prediction (MTP)](https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/concepts/mtp.md): Extra heads learn to predict several future tokens, and can draft tokens at inference.

## Benchmark (Artificial Analysis Intelligence Index)

- AA Intelligence Index v4.3.2: total 8.5 (General 15.3, Scientific 1.5, Coding 17.9, Agents 0.1)

## Links

- Architecture diagram: https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/images/architectures/deepseek-v3-r1-671-billion.webp
- View in article: https://magazine.sebastianraschka.com/p/the-big-llm-architecture-comparison#%C2%A75-llama-4
- config.json: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3/blob/main/config.json
- License: https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3/blame/main/LICENSE-MODEL
- Tech report: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.19437
- Source card (source of truth): https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/#card-deepseek-v3
- Web page: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/models/deepseek-v3/
- JSON: https://llm-atlas-7or.pages.dev/api/models/deepseek-v3.json

_Data from Sebastian Raschka's LLM Architecture Gallery (https://sebastianraschka.com/llm-architecture-gallery/). Synced 2026-11-04._