Back in May this year, my longtime friend Alex reached out and asked me if I wanted to collaborate with him on a book about DeepSeek. I would love to tell you the story of how I thought long and hard before getting back to him. I didn't. I just said yes.
Now, 6 months later, I'm excited to announce that DeepSeek in Practice is out and available for pre-order! The book is published by Packt and is a collaboration between Andy Peng, Alex Strick van Linschoten, and me.
As the title suggests, this book focuses on DeepSeek models, which famously took the world by storm earlier this year. It's organized into three parts: "Understanding and Exploring DeepSeek" examines their role in the wider LLM world. "Using DeepSeek" is entirely dedicated to applying DeepSeek models to real-world problems. Finally, "Distilling and Deploying DeepSeek," covers distillation and deployment.
Even though the book was a joint effort, my main focus was on Part 2, and how to use DeepSeek models to tackle real-world problems. In particular two chapters:
Chapter 5, Building with DeepSeek, walks through creating an alternative to Garmin's daily summary notifications. We go through building a prototype using DeepSeek's API, how to leverage local models, frameworks like XGrammars and vLLM, all the way to deploying your own model using AWS Large Model Inference (LMI).
Chapter 6, Agents with DeepSeek, is all about agents. We start with a short intro to agents, tools, and the inner workings of the MCP protocol. After that, we build (from scratch) three different agents powered by DeepSeek models: an evaluator-optimizer that summarizes Arxiv papers, an orchestrator-worker that generates research reports, and a tool-calling agent that can search the web and answer complex questions.
Overall, I'm really excited that this book finally gets to see the light of day. Contributing to a book is no small feat. The process is rough: lots of discussion and lots of drafts thrown in the trash. It was hard work, but also a lot of fun.
I hope you enjoy it!
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