It's fairly clear that R1-Llama or R1-Qwen is a distill, and they're all coming directly from DeepSeek.

As an aside, at least the larger distilled models (I'm mostly running r1-llama-distill-70b) are definitely not the same thing as the base llama/qwen models. I'm getting better results locally, admittedly with the slower inference time as it does the whole "<think>" section.

Surprisingly - The content in the <think> section is actually quite useful on its own. If you're using the model to spitball or brainstorm, getting to see it do that process is just flat out useful. Sometimes more-so than the actual answer it finally produces.

I would recommend you to try to run the llama-based distill (same size, same quantization) that you can find here: https://huggingface.co/bartowski/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8...

It should take the same amount of memory as the one you currently have.

In my experience the Llama version performs much better at adhering to the prompt, understanding data in multiple languages, and going in-depth in its responses.

It's a model called Qwen, trained by Alibaba, which the DeepSeek team has used to "distill" knowledge from their own (100x bigger) model.

Think of it as forcing a junior Qwen to listen in while the smarter, PhD-level model was asked thousands of tough problems. It will acquire some of that knowledge and learn a lot of the reasoning process.

It cannot become exactly as smart, for the same reason a dog can learn lots of tricks from a human but not become human-level itself: it doesn't have enough neurons/capacity. Here, Qwen is a 7B model so it can't cram within 7 billion parameters as much data as you can cram into 671 billion. It can literally only learn 1% as much, BUT the distillation process is cleverly built and allows to focus on the "right" 1%.

Then this now-smarter Qwen is quantized. This means that we take its parameters (16-bit floats, super precise numbers) and truncate them to make them use less memory space. This also makes it less precise. Think of it as taking a super high resolution movie picture and compressing it into a small GIF. You lose some information, but the gist of it is preserved.

As a result of both of these transformations, you get something that can run on your local machine — but is a bit dumber than the original — because it's about 400 times smaller than the real deal.

And I think they, the DeepSeek team, finetunes Qwen 7b on DeepSeek. That is how I understood it.

Which apparently makes it quite good for a 7b model. But, again: if I understood it correctly, is still just qween and without the reasoning of DeepSeek.