Simon Willison’s Weblog
DeepSeek are the Chinese AI lab who dropped the best currently available open weights LLM on Christmas day, DeepSeek v3. That model was trained in part using their unreleased R1 “reasoning” model. Today they’ve released R1 itself, along with a whole family of new models derived from that base.
DeepSeek-R1-Zero appears to be the base model. It’s over 650GB in size and, like most of their other releases, is under a clean MIT license. DeepSeek warn that “DeepSeek-R1-Zero encounters challenges such as endless repetition, poor readability, and language mixing.” ... so they also released:
DeepSeek-R1—which “incorporates cold-start data before RL” and “achieves performance comparable to OpenAI-o1 across math, code, and reasoning tasks”. That one is also MIT licensed, and is a similar size.
I don’t have the ability to run models larger than about 50GB (I have an M2 with 64GB of RAM), so neither of these two models are something I can easily play with myself. That’s where the new distilled models come in.
