Question 1

What is DeepSeek R1's reasoning capability?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 uses special 'chain-of-thought' reinforcement learning that allows it to think through problems step-by-step, similar to OpenAI's o1 model.

Question 2

Is DeepSeek R1 free?

Accepted Answer

Yes, the model weights are open and free to download under the MIT license, making it one of the most permissive powerful reasoning models available.

Question 3

Can DeepSeek R1 run locally?

Accepted Answer

Yes! The distilled variants (1.5B, 7B, 14B, 32B, 70B) run on consumer hardware. The 32B distilled version runs well on a single RTX 5080 or RTX 5090.

Question 4

How does DeepSeek R1 compare to GPT-4o?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 matches or exceeds GPT-4o on math, coding, and logical reasoning benchmarks. It's particularly strong on AIME (math olympiad) and Codeforces problems.

Question 5

What VRAM do I need for DeepSeek R1?

Accepted Answer

The 32B distilled version requires ~20GB at Q4_K_M. The 70B distilled version needs ~40GB+. The full 671B MoE model is impractical for consumer hardware.

Question 6

Why is DeepSeek R1 significant?

Accepted Answer

DeepSeek R1 demonstrated that smaller, efficiently trained models can match larger proprietary models in reasoning tasks, dramatically lowering the cost of frontier-level AI performance.

Question 7

Is DeepSeek R1 better than Claude or ChatGPT?

Accepted Answer

In math and coding benchmarks, DeepSeek R1 is competitive with or outperforms Claude 3.5 Sonnet and GPT-4o. However, creative writing and nuanced instruction-following may favor Claude.

The Best GPUs for Running DeepSeek R1

Recommended VRAM Configurations

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