Your own AI on your own server is an open model like DeepSeek or Qwen, running inside the company. It reads documents, answers employees, sorts through mail and contracts, and not a single request goes to someone else’s cloud. The model itself is free: you pay for hardware and deployment, and the data stays in the country and in the company.
How it works
A model is a file of weights: billions of numbers that record everything it has learned. An open license, like DeepSeek V4’s MIT license, lets you download this file, run it yourself and build it into your own products. DeepSeek V4 has 1.6 trillion parameters, but it is built as a team of experts: for each word only a small part of the network switches on, and that spares the GPUs.
The model runs on a server with GPUs: the weights are loaded into their memory, and the bigger the model, the more cards you need. For many office tasks smaller versions are enough — open models usually come out in several sizes, and compressing the weights lowers memory requirements at the cost of a small loss of accuracy. A server program takes employees’ questions from chat, mail or a portal and returns answers.
For the model to know the company’s affairs, you do not have to retrain it. Documents are cut into fragments and placed in a search index; when an employee asks a question, the system finds the right pieces and gives them to the model along with the question. The answer comes with links to the original source, and access rights are the same as in the file storage: you cannot read a document through the model if it is closed to that employee.
Where it already works
- Answers for employees on policies, instructions and the internal knowledge base.
- Contract and mail review: summaries, deadlines, risks, draft replies.
- Companies with personal data and trade secrets: banks, clinics, industry.
- Russia: a strong option — data stays inside the country and the company.
- Agents and programming on your own server, without external APIs.
What to consider
- The model is free, the GPUs are not: the model size the task needs sets the budget.
- Open models trail the flagships by 3–6 months — by DeepSeek’s own estimate.
- You need your own specialist or a contractor: updates, monitoring, access rights, backups.
- Check each model’s license: DeepSeek V4’s MIT license allows commercial use; others have their own terms.