Overview
DeepSeek-Coder-V2-Lite-Instruct is the smaller member of the DeepSeek-Coder-V2 family, released by DeepSeek AI in mid-2024.
- License: DeepSeek License (commercial use allowed)
- Context length: 128K tokens
- Architecture: Mixture-of-Experts, 16B total / 2.4B active
- Languages: 338 programming languages
- Minimum hardware: ~10-12 GB VRAM at 4-bit
- Strengths: code completion, generation, FIM insertion, math reasoning
Highlights
- Open MoE code model — Coder-V2 family, with coding quality Microsoft-comparable to GPT-4 Turbo.
- +6T code-heavy tokens — further pretrained from DeepSeek-V2 for stronger code and math.
- 338 programming languages — broad language coverage with a 128K-token context.
- Lite active footprint — mixture-of-experts routing keeps per-token compute low.
What it's good at
The model is built for programming. It supports 338 programming languages and handles code completion, fill-in-the-middle insertion, generation, and debugging. On HumanEval it scores around 81% pass@1, and it does well on MBPP and math benchmarks such as GSM8K thanks to the math-heavy pretraining. The 128K context window means it can read large files or several files at once, which helps with repository-level questions. The much larger 236B sibling reaches GPT-4-Turbo-level results on code tasks; the Lite model gives up some of that accuracy in exchange for running on modest hardware.
Running locally
The MoE design keeps inference cheap. Full BF16 weights need about 32 GB of memory, but 4-bit GGUF quants drop that to roughly 10-12 GB, so the Lite model runs on a single 16 GB GPU or an Apple Silicon Mac with enough unified memory. You can serve it with Hugging Face Transformers (set trust_remote_code=True), vLLM for higher throughput, or llama.cpp and Ollama using community GGUF builds. The chat template uses User:/Assistant: turns with DeepSeek's special sentence tokens.
License
The code repository is MIT-licensed, and the weights fall under the DeepSeek Model License. That license permits commercial use, so teams can deploy the model in products, subject to the terms in the agreement. Review the model license before shipping it commercially.

