Build DeepSeek from Scratch

A comprehensive hands-on guide covering every major DeepSeek innovation — from KV Cache and Multi-Head Latent Attention to Mixture-of-Experts, Multi-Token Prediction, FP8 Quantization, Sparse Attention, Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections, Conditional Memory (Engram), and the million-token DeepSeek-V4 architecture.

This book guides you through building the key components of the DeepSeek language model family from scratch. Based on research papers from DeepSeek-AI spanning V2 through V4, each part combines theory with practical PyTorch implementations.

DeepSeek represents a turning point in open-source AI. By the end of this book, you will not only understand what makes each DeepSeek generation unique but also how to implement those innovations yourself.

What you’ll build

  • Part 1: Introduction — Why DeepSeek matters and a high-level roadmap
  • Part 2: KV Cache — Solving the inference bottleneck, from MHA to MQA and GQA
  • Part 3: Multi-Head Latent Attention — DeepSeek’s breakthrough 64× memory reduction
  • Part 4: Mixture-of-Experts — Scaling intelligence efficiently with sparse expert routing
  • Part 5: MTP & FP8 Quantization — Advanced training objectives and numerical precision
  • Part 6: DeepSeek Sparse Attention (DSA) — O(L·k) complexity via lightning indexing
  • Part 7: mHC — Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections for stable deep networks
  • Part 8: Engram — Conditional memory as a second axis of sparsity
  • Part 9: DeepSeek-V4 — Hybrid CSA/HCA attention for million-token contexts

Paper Sources

  • DeepSeek-V2 / V3 / R1 papers (2024-2025)
  • DeepSeek-V3.2: Pushing the Frontier of Open LLMs (Dec 2025)
  • mHC: Manifold-Constrained Hyper-Connections (Dec 2025)
  • Engram: Conditional Memory via Scalable Lookup (Jan 2026)
  • DeepSeek-V4: Towards Highly Efficient Million-Token Context Intelligence (Apr 2026)