- February 20, 2025
- 3 min read
DeepSeek Models Now Available on FriendliAI

"DeepSeek this, DeepSeek that" — the buzz around DeepSeek's large language models is electrifying! With groundbreaking advancements in AI, DeepSeek is revolutionizing industries across the globe. We’re excited to share that DeepSeek’s powerful models are now accessible on FriendliAI’s platforms. DeepSeek R1 671B is ready for use on Serverless Endpoints. Even better, you can deploy optimized, distilled, and fine-tuned DeepSeek models on Dedicated Endpoints!
But what makes DeepSeek so special, and how does FriendliAI supercharge models? Let’s dive in.
What even is DeepSeek?
DeepSeek models, developed by the Chinese AI company DeepSeek, have gained significant attention due to their competitive performance and open-source availability. Key models include:
- DeepSeek V3 (December 2024): A 671B parameter language model using Mixture-of-Experts (MoE) architecture and Multi-head Latent Attention (MLA). It features auxiliary-loss-free strategy and Multi-Token Prediction (MTP) for improved performance. Post-trained using Supervised Fine-Tuning (SFT) and Reinforcement Learning (RL), it competes with closed-source models like Claude 3.5 Sonnet on certain benchmarks.
- DeepSeek R1 (January 2025): Built upon V3, improving reasoning and problem-solving through large-scale RL. While R1 Zero, trained with RL without SFT, showed impressive reasoning, it encountered issues like endless repetition, poor readability, and language mixing. R1 incorporated cold-start data before training to address these issues. R1 outperforms OpenAI's o1 model on some benchmarks, and its distilled version, DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B outperforms OpenAI's o1-mini on several benchmarks.
Open-source models like DeepSeek make cutting-edge AI accessible, allowing users to build on existing frameworks without proprietary constraints. This flexibility helps individuals, developers, and organizations create tailored AI solutions for diverse challenges.
Why Choose FriendliAI?
While DeepSeek’s AI models offer impressive capabilities, the company’s app has raised security and privacy concerns, leading to bans in several countries. This is where FriendliAI comes into play.
FriendliAI stands out as the premier choice for utilizing DeepSeek models, offering enhanced security by keeping your data safe. With pioneering inference acceleration technology, FriendliAI boosts processing speeds, ensuring efficient AI operations.
Recognized globally as the first startup to be integrated as a deployment option on HuggingFace, FriendliAI combines security, speed, affordability, and customization, making it easy to scale and integrate DeepSeek models into your applications, offering flexible options for diverse customer needs.
Leveraging DeepSeek models is easier than ever with Friendli Suite. Choose the option that suits your needs:
Use Serverless Endpoints
Start instantly by sending API requests or visit Friendli Suite Serverless Endpoint Playground:

For example, you can use OpenAI Python SDK to interact with FriendliAI, along with many other popular SDKs supported. Click here to see more.
Learn more about how to use Serverless Endpoints here.
Deploy on Dedicated Endpoints
Quickly deploy optimized distilled models and custom fine-tuned models from HuggingFace with ease. To deploy models on Dedicated Endpoints, simply click the "Deploy" button on HuggingFace.

Here are the links to some of the models, provided for your convenience:
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-14B
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-7B
- DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B
You will then be directed to our Deploy Model page; click the “Deploy now” button. This action will prompt you to choose your deployment method: opt for a quick setup with “One-click” or customize your deployment with “Configure myself.” This simple and intuitive process lets you launch your models efficiently with minimal effort. That’s it! You are all set to go. Happy deploying!

Get Started Today
Don’t miss out on the opportunity to harness the power of DeepSeek models. Industry leaders worldwide have already chosen FriendliAI — now it’s your turn. Click here to accelerate your business with generative AI and start building today.
Written by
FriendliAI Tech & Research
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General FAQ
What is FriendliAI?
FriendliAI is the Frontier Inference Cloud for Agents, delivering high throughput, low latency, and reliability at scale for agentic workloads. Through vertically optimized inference infrastructure, it delivers 2–5× faster output token speed and a 99.99% uptime SLA for high-volume production traffic.
How does FriendliAI reduce inference costs?
FriendliAI reduces inference costs through higher GPU utilization and optimized inference performance. FriendliAI's patented continuous batching technique, along with quantization, speculative decoding, KV cache offloading, multi-LoRA serving, and autoscaling, helps you serve more tokens with fewer GPUs, lowering your infrastructure costs without sacrificing performance.
Why should I choose FriendliAI over other inference providers?
FriendliAI is built for production AI agents, combining speed, reliability, and efficiency at scale. It delivers low-latency streaming, reliable long-context inference, and robust tool calling without compromising stability. According to independent OpenRouter benchmarks, FriendliAI consistently ranks among the top providers for throughput, latency, and reliability across leading open-weight models. See why customers choose FriendliAI
Which open-weight models does FriendliAI support?
Run today’s frontier open-weight models—including GLM, MiniMax, Kimi, DeepSeek, Qwen, Gemma, and more—with a simple API call. FriendliAI Model API gives you instant access to the latest models with optimized inference performance for production workloads. Explore models and pricing
How do I get started?
Getting started takes just a few minutes. [1] Sign up for FriendliAI, [2] Generate your API key, and [3] Make your first inference request with frontier open-weight models.
Still have questions?
If you want a customized solution for that key issue that is slowing your growth, support@friendli.ai or click Talk to an engineer — our engineers (not a bot) will reply within one business day.

