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DeepSeek R1
◆ OPEN
by DeepSeek
OPEN WEIGHTSLOCALWRITING HELPCODING HELPRESEARCH ASSISTANT
RANKED #35 OF 267 ASSISTANTS · OVERALL #54 OF 6,566 · VIBE SCORE 6.7 · 2,266 VOICES
A powerful AI for writing essays, coding help, and complex problem-solving.
HAPPY9.0
576 mentions
SAD6.0
272 mentions
VIBE TRAJECTORY
26 weeks · 559 voices
HONEYMOON FADING
Early praise is cooling off in recent weeks.
HOW TO USE IT
Open weights. You can use a hosted service, or download it and run it yourself, free.
RUN IT ON YOUR OWN MACHINE
Open weights: download DeepSeek R1 once and it's yours. No subscription, no rate limits, works offline.
671B parameters for the full model (Q4 is ~380 GB), but distilled versions range from 1.5B to 70B (8B Q4 is about 5 GB)
- BARE MINIMUM
NVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB
12 GB VRAM
~$200 USEDDeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-8B (Q4_K_M), ~25 tok/s, 8k context
- SWEET SPOT
Apple Mac Studio M2 Max (64GB RAM)
64 GB UNIFIED MEMORY
~$1600 USEDDeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B (Q4_K_M) or 70B (Q3_K_L), ~15 tok/s, 16k context
- FULL POWER
Apple Mac Studio M2 Ultra (192GB RAM)
192 GB UNIFIED MEMORY
~$4200 USEDDeepSeek-R1 671B (IQ1_S 1.58-bit quant), ~5 tok/s, 8k context
LEARN HOW TO SET IT UP
WILL MY BOX RUN DEEPSEEK R1?
The three cards above are researched picks. Search the machine you actually have — we only say yes if it should reply at a usable speed, not just load the weights and crawl.
HARDWARE PICKS & PRICES ARE RESEARCHED FROM THE LIVE WEB AND REFRESHED AUTOMATICALLY. TREAT THEM AS BALLPARK, NOT GOSPEL.
WHAT CAN YOU ACTUALLY DO WITH IT?
Everyday jobs on each of those rigs: how long DeepSeek R1 takes, and how good the crowd says it is at that kind of work.
| THE JOB | BARE MINIMUMNVIDIA GeForce RTX 3060 12GB | SWEET SPOTApple Mac Studio M2 Max (64GB RAM) | FULL POWERApple Mac Studio M2 Ultra (192GB RAM) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Write an emaila paragraph or two, drafted from a one-line brief | ~20 S★★★★★ | ~33 S★★★★★ | ~1.7 MIN★★★★★ |
| Summarize a documenta long report boiled down to the points that matter | ~60 S★★★★★ | ~1.7 MIN★★★★★ | ~5 MIN★★★★★ |
| Build a websitea small landing page, markup and styles together | ~5.3 MIN★★★★★ | ~8.9 MIN★★★★★ | ~27 MIN★★★★★ |
| Build a backendan API with routes, storage and tests | ~17 MIN★★★★★ | ~28 MIN★★★★★ | ~83 MIN★★★★★ |
| Build a gamea playable browser game in one file | ~10 MIN★★★★★ | ~17 MIN★★★★★ | ~50 MIN★★★★★ |
STARS ARE THE COMMUNITY SCORE FOR THAT KIND OF WORK, DOCKED FOR HOW SQUASHED THE WEIGHTS GET AT EACH TIER. TIMES ARE COMPUTED FROM RESEARCHED SPEEDS. BALLPARK, NOT GOSPEL.
WHAT THE INTERNET SAYS
Users praise DeepSeek R1 for its fast responses, strong essay writing, and solid coding skills. However, some complain about unexpected costs, occasional made-up facts, and frustrating refusals or outages.
1800 POSTS · 466 COMMENTS · DEV.TO · REDDIT · DEV FORUMS · X · HACKER NEWS · LEMMY · GITHUB · BLOG
PEOPLE LOVE
- Popular for coding help (23 mentions)
- Answers come back fast (10 mentions)
- Good at writing and wording things (6 mentions)
PEOPLE COMPLAIN ABOUT
- People find it expensive (22 mentions)
- Sometimes makes things up (19 mentions)
- Refuses or lectures more than people like (12 mentions)
- Outages, errors, or limits get in the way (9 mentions)
TOPIC BY TOPIC
- Getting facts rightMIXED FEELINGS
19 thumbs up · 19 thumbs down
- PriceA SORE SPOT
14 thumbs up · 22 thumbs down
- Help with codePEOPLE LOVE THIS
23 thumbs up · 2 thumbs down
- Saying no too muchMIXED FEELINGS
9 thumbs up · 12 thumbs down
- Working when you need itA SORE SPOT
3 thumbs up · 9 thumbs down
- SpeedPEOPLE LOVE THIS
10 thumbs up · 1 thumbs down
- WritingPEOPLE LOVE THIS
6 thumbs up · 2 thumbs down
IN THEIR OWN WORDS
- FROM REDDIT >
“Verses AI (Genius) outperforms Deepseek R1 in the code-breaking challenge, being 779 times cheaper, 245 times faster, and far more accurate (Deepseek R1 solved only 45% of the challenge, while Verses AI solved it entirely).”
- FROM REDDIT >
“DeepSeek R1 outperforms o3-mini (medium) on the Confabulations (Hallucinations) Benchmark.”
- FROM BLOG >
“Although it was introduced in the DeepSeek R1 paper rather than originating from academia, it has still made for an exciting year for researchers: both RLVR and GRPO are conceptually interesting and, depending on scale, not prohibitively expensive to experiment with.”
- FROM REDDIT >
“GPT-5 is a downgrade, DeepSeek R1 is much better.”
- FROM REDDIT >
“Deepseek r1 is a very strong essayist.”
LOOKING FOR AN ALTERNATIVE?
Checked picks first: tags say why you would switch, stars say how fully each one stands in for DeepSeek R1.
Qwen Plus
Phi 4 Mini> SOURCES (12)
- DEV.TO · 2025-01-29 · 2904 UPVOTESRun DeepSeek-R1 Locally & Build RAG Applications!
Run DeepSeek-R1 Locally & Build RAG Applications!
- REDDIT · 2026-02-23 · 1285 UPVOTESHere we go again. DeepSeek R1 was a literal copy paste of OpenAI models. They got locked out, now they are on Anthropic. Fraud!
Here we go again. DeepSeek R1 was a literal copy paste of OpenAI models. They got locked out, now they are on Anthropic. Fraud!
- REDDIT · 2025-01-28 · 1268 UPVOTESYou can now run DeepSeek-R1 on your own local device!
You can now run DeepSeek-R1 on your own local device!
- REDDIT · 2026-01-01 · 1198 UPVOTESDo it again, DeepSeek
Do it again, DeepSeek
- DEV.TO · 2025-01-28 · 1059 UPVOTES🚀 Setting Up Ollama & Running DeepSeek R1 Locally for a Powerful RAG System
🚀 Setting Up Ollama & Running DeepSeek R1 Locally for a Powerful RAG System
- REDDIT · 2025-01-24 · 1034 UPVOTESMarc Andreessen: "Deepseek R1: a profound gift to the world"
Marc Andreessen: "Deepseek R1: a profound gift to the world"
- DEV.TO · 2025-01-27 · 919 UPVOTESA Step-by-Step Guide to Install DeepSeek-R1 Locally with Ollama, vLLM or Transformers
A Step-by-Step Guide to Install DeepSeek-R1 Locally with Ollama, vLLM or Transformers
- REDDIT · 2025-03-28 · 900 UPVOTESMessage from Aravind, Cofounder and CEO of Perplexity
Message from Aravind, Cofounder and CEO of Perplexity
- LEMMY · 2025-06-08 · 834 UPVOTESApple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. They just memorize patterns…
Apple just proved AI "reasoning" models like Claude, DeepSeek-R1, and o3-mini don't actually reason at all. They just memorize patterns really well.
- REDDIT · 2024-11-20 · 806 UPVOTESChinese o1 competitor (DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview) thinks for over 6 minutes! (Even GPT4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet couldn't solve this)
Chinese o1 competitor (DeepSeek-R1-Lite-Preview) thinks for over 6 minutes! (Even GPT4o and Claude 3.5 Sonnet couldn't solve this)
- REDDIT · 2025-01-23 · 721 UPVOTESDeepSeek R1 has an existential crisis
DeepSeek R1 has an existential crisis
- REDDIT · 2024-11-20 · 712 UPVOTESDeepSeek-R1-Lite suprised by the third R in strawberry
DeepSeek-R1-Lite suprised by the third R in strawberry