A quick note to all Agilebase administrators.

You may have noticed the brouhaha about DeepSeek in the news recently, the new Chinese AI model that is competitive with the best to date, but at the fraction of the training cost:

https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/01/china-is-catching-up-with-americas-best-reasoning-ai-models/

As DeepSeek is an ‘open source’ model, anyone can run it on their own servers and indeed you can use this with Agilebase now, using the new ‘choose your AI’ feature that was announced last week.

All you need to do is go to your user profile from the menu at the top right, then click ‘organisation settings’ and paste the text

deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-V3

into the Model field. You don’t need to enter anything into the other fields.

Then whenever you ask Agilebase to create a calculation for you, or write your own prompt to create an AI workflow for example, it will use that model.

Privacy

It’s important to note, although DeepSeek is a Chinese-created model, your data does not get sent to China but it does get sent to the US. As we mentioned, the open source nature means you can if you like run it on any server of your selection. We’ve chosen to use together.ai by default, a San Francisco based company. 

If you want to run on your own infrastructure, just enter the server details in the other fields. You may need to ask your IT dept., or us for help – please shout if you need it.

Performance

With the help of Richard from https://www.littlehouseconsultancy.co.uk we’ve done our own initial benchmarks on some typical Agilebase tasks and found the model to be pretty capable. It’s slightly better than anything else in many tests, but slightly worse than the second best in some.

For example, when asked to troubleshoot a buggy calculation, it correctly and succinctly identified all three errors – the previous best score was two of them. Also when creating calculations from scratch, it sometimes adds helpful comments explaining how they work, which I’ve not seen before.

Helping people create complex calculations in Agilebase is one of the most used AI features in Agilebase at the moment, so that’s nice to see.

Please feel free to try it out yourself and I’d be interested to hear what you think.

You can in fact run any other model you’d like to try, there are plenty to choose from. A full list of those which together.ai provides is at

https://www.together.ai/models