Model reference · open weights

deepseek-vl

LLMs deepseek-ai Vision + text 2 builds Its own licence terms 9k dl/mo

deepseek-vl is an open-weight language model from DeepSeek. deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat (FP16) weighs 4.0 GB; the smallest configuration that runs it is RTX 3060 12 GB.

For self-hosting, compare this build's requirements below with the GPU you plan to rent.

  • DeepSeek-VL is an open-source vision-language model developed by DeepSeek for real-world vision and language understanding tasks.
  • The 7.3B parameter model processes image-text inputs to handle logical diagrams, web pages, formula recognition, and natural images.
  • It supports commercial use under the DeepSeek Model License.

Summary of the deepseek-ai/deepseek-vl-7b-chat model card, 2026-10-01. The estimate below is for another build of the family.

What it is

Released byDeepSeek
Released2024-03-07
Parameters7.3B
VRAM4.0 GB for the weights

What it runs on

Memory and cards for deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat (FP16)

4.0 GBweights, file size
197 MBcache per 1K tokens
1.9 GBruntime overhead, at least
16,384 tokenscontext max
CardRequests at onceContext maxMemory
8K each
RTX 3060 12 GB3all 16K11.6 GB
RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB5all 16K15.4 GB
RTX 3090 24 GB10all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 4090 24 GB10all 16K23.4 GB
RTX 5090 32 GB15all 16K31.0 GB
L40S 48 GB23all 16K44.0 GB
A100 80 GB44all 16K78.2 GB
H100 80 GB42all 16K78.1 GB
RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell 96 GB52all 16K93.8 GB
DGX Spark (GB10) 128 GB unified60all 16K107 GB
H200 141 GB79all 16K138 GB
B200 180 GB103all 16K176 GB
2× RTX 3060 12 GB
tensor parallel
9all 16K11.6 GB a card
2× RTX 4060 Ti 16 GB
tensor parallel
14all 16K15.4 GB a card
Memory needed at each load
Requests at once8K tokens each
17.5 GB
513.9 GB
818.7 GB
1631.6 GB
3257.4 GB
64109 GB

One card, with vLLM's small-card settings.

Builds

Sizes, precisions & builds

BuildParamsPrecisionWeightsSmallest setup
deepseek-vl-7b-chat ↗ 7.3BFP16 14.7 GBRTX 4090 24 GB
deepseek-vl-1.3b-chat (above) ↗ 2.0BFP16 4.0 GBRTX 3060 12 GB

From the model card

What DeepSeek says about deepseek-vl

Read the model card

1. Introduction

Introducing DeepSeek-VL, an open-source Vision-Language (VL) Model designed for real-world vision and language understanding applications. DeepSeek-VL possesses general multimodal understanding capabilities, capable of processing logical diagrams, web pages, formula recognition, scientific literature, natural images, and embodied intelligence in complex scenarios.

DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding

Github Repository

Haoyu Lu*, Wen Liu*, Bo Zhang**, Bingxuan Wang, Kai Dong, Bo Liu, Jingxiang Sun, Tongzheng Ren, Zhuoshu Li, Hao Yang, Yaofeng Sun, Chengqi Deng, Hanwei Xu, Zhenda Xie, Chong Ruan (*Equal Contribution, **Project Lead)

2. Model Summary

DeepSeek-VL-7b-base uses the SigLIP-L and SAM-B as the hybrid vision encoder supporting 1024 x 1024 image input and is constructed based on the DeepSeek-LLM-7b-base which is trained on an approximate corpus of 2T text tokens. The whole DeepSeek-VL-7b-base model is finally trained around 400B vision-language tokens. DeekSeel-VL-7b-chat is an instructed version based on DeepSeek-VL-7b-base.

3. Quick Start

Installation

On the basis of Python >= 3.8 environment, install the necessary dependencies by running the following command:

git clone https://github.com/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-VL
cd DeepSeek-VL

pip install -e .

Simple Inference Example

import torch
from transformers import AutoModelForCausalLM

from deepseek_vl.models import VLChatProcessor, MultiModalityCausalLM
from deepseek_vl.utils.io import load_pil_images

# specify the path to the model
model_path = "deepseek-ai/deepseek-vl-7b-chat"
vl_chat_processor: VLChatProcessor = VLChatProcessor.from_pretrained(model_path)
tokenizer = vl_chat_processor.tokenizer

vl_gpt: MultiModalityCausalLM = AutoModelForCausalLM.from_pretrained(model_path, trust_remote_code=True)
vl_gpt = vl_gpt.to(torch.bfloat16).cuda().eval()

conversation = [
    {
        "role": "User",
        "content": "Describe each stage of this image.",
        "images": ["./images/training_pipelines.png"]
    },
    {
        "role": "Assistant",
        "content": ""
    }
]

# load images and prepare for inputs
pil_images = load_pil_images(conversation)
prepare_inputs = vl_chat_processor(
    conversations=conversation,
    images=pil_images,
    force_batchify=True
).to(vl_gpt.device)

# run image encoder to get the image embeddings
inputs_embeds = vl_gpt.prepare_inputs_embeds(**prepare_inputs)

# run the model to get the response
outputs = vl_gpt.language_model.generate(
    inputs_embeds=inputs_embeds,
    attention_mask=prepare_inputs.attention_mask,
    pad_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    bos_token_id=tokenizer.bos_token_id,
    eos_token_id=tokenizer.eos_token_id,
    max_new_tokens=512,
    do_sample=False,
    use_cache=True
)

answer = tokenizer.decode(outputs[0].cpu().tolist(), skip_special_tokens=True)
print(f"{prepare_inputs['sft_format'][0]}", answer)

CLI Chat


python cli_chat.py --model_path "deepseek-ai/deepseek-vl-7b-chat"

# or local path
python cli_chat.py --model_path "local model path"

4. License

This code repository is licensed under the MIT License. The use of DeepSeek-VL Base/Chat models is subject to DeepSeek Model License. DeepSeek-VL series (including Base and Chat) supports commercial use.

5. Citation

@misc{lu2024deepseekvl,
      title={DeepSeek-VL: Towards Real-World Vision-Language Understanding},
      author={Haoyu Lu and Wen Liu and Bo Zhang and Bingxuan Wang and Kai Dong and Bo Liu and Jingxiang Sun and Tongzheng Ren and Zhuoshu Li and Yaofeng Sun and Chengqi Deng and Hanwei Xu and Zhenda Xie and Chong Ruan},
      year={2024},
      eprint={2403.05525},
      archivePrefix={arXiv},
      primaryClass={cs.AI}
}

6. Contact

If you have any questions, please raise an issue or contact us at service@deepseek.com.

Quoted from the model card on Hugging Face. The full card is behind the Hugging Face link above.

© 2026 AxForge · EU-hosted AI infrastructure Pricing Docs Trust Privacy Terms