DeepSeek R1 Distilled Models in Ollama: Not What You Think

Author(s): Kshitij Darwhekar

Originally published on Towards AI.

DeepSeek R1’s distilled models in Ollama sound like smaller versions of the original, but are they really?

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DeepSeek recently introduced its models, including DeepSeek V3 and DeepSeek R1. These models have gained significant popularity in the AI community and on social media due to their impressive performance compared to models like OpenAI’s o1. Unlike OpenAI’s models, DeepSeek’s models are fully open-source and free to use.

DeepSeek Models in comparison with OpenAI’s models.

Since DeepSeek models are open-source and licensed under MIT, they are free to use for both personal and commercial purposes, and you can even run them locally. However, unless you have an insanely powerful machine, you won’t be able to run DeepSeek R1 on your local setup.

That’s where the smaller distilled models come in. DeepSeek has not only released the R1:671B model but also several dense models that are widely used in the research community.

All of these models are available on Hugging Face and Ollama, so you can choose whichever platform you prefer. In the next section, we’ll dive deeper into these distilled models and their performance.

In simple terms, distillation is… Read the full blog for free on Medium.

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Published via Towards AI