DeepSeek and Spring AI

DeepSeek provides an OpenAI compatible API at the endpoint https://api.deepseek.com. In Spring AI projects, we can use OpenAI module to work with DeepSeek.

When using Spring Boot, we only need to add the spring-ai-openai-spring-boot-starter dependency.

OpenAI Spring Boot starter

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.springframework.ai</groupId>
    <artifactId>spring-ai-openai-spring-boot-starter</artifactId>
</dependency>

To use DeepSeek, we need to set spring.ai.openai.baseUrl to https://api.deepseek.com. For the model, we can use either deepseek-reasoner for DeepSeek R1, or deepseek-chat for DeepSeek V3. DeepSeek R1 takes a longer time to respond, and doesn't support function calling or JSON output. DeepSeek V3 supports function calling and JSON output, but has some issues. The API key of DeepSeek is set to environment variable DEEPSEEK_API_KEY.

DeepSeek config

spring:
  ai:
    openai:
      baseUrl: https://api.deepseek.com
      api-key: ${DEEPSEEK_API_KEY:}
      chat:
        options:
          model: deepseek-chat
          temperature: 0.0