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Comment by Deathmax

6 months ago

It's simple enough to test the tokenizer to determine the base model in use (DeepSeek V3, or a Llama 3/Qwen 2.5 distill).

Using the text "സ്മാർട്ട്", Qwen 2.5 tokenizes as 10 tokens, Llama 3 as 13, and DeepSeek V3 as 8.

Using DeepSeek's chat frontend, both DeepSeek V3 and R1 returns the following response (SSE events edited for brevity):

  {"content":"സ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
  {"content":"്മ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":2
  {"content":"ാ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
  {"content":"ർ","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
  {"content":"ട","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
  {"content":"്ട","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1
  {"content":"്","type":"text"},"chunk_token_usage":1

which totals to 8, as expected for DeepSeek V3's tokenizer.

I’m not sure I understand what this comment is responding to. Wouldn’t a distilled Deepseek still use the same tokenizer? I’m not claiming they are using llama in their backend. I’m just saying they are likely using a lower-parameter model too.

  • The small models that have been published as part of the DeepSeek release are not a "distilled DeepSeek", they're fine-tuned varieties of Llama and Qwen. DeepSeek may have smaller models internally that are not Llama- or Qwen-based but if so they haven't released them.

    • Thank you. I’m still learning as I’m sure everyone else is, and that’s a distinction I wasn’t aware of. (I assumed “distilled” meant a compressed parameter size, not necessarily the use of another model in its construction.)