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Comparing DeepSeek-R1 Models: 32B vs 70B vs R1

DeepSeek has made waves in the AI world. They offer multiple models at the same time, so which one should we choose?

Lorentz Yeung
Towards AI
6 min readFeb 3, 2025

Introduction

DeepSeek, a Chinese AI company founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, has made significant strides in artificial intelligence with its release of the DeepSeek-R1 model. This open-source language model has garnered attention for its performance in reasoning tasks, rivaling models like OpenAI’s o1. Notably, DeepSeek achieved this with a fraction of the resources typically required, highlighting China’s rapid advancement in AI technology.

In my exploration of DeepSeek’s offerings, I evaluated two of their models: DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-32B and DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-70B. Both models are available for download from Ollama official website through this link. (deepseek-r1) For example, if you would like to download the 32B model, which is 20GB in size, you can just follow the instruction in this page.

Pip install Ollama first, then run this command “ollama run deepseek-r1:32b” in your terminal. Picuture by the author.

For more details about DeepSeek’s research and architecture, you can check out the official DeepSeek website (deepseek.com).

Hardware Setup

I ran these models on my i7–14700KF 3.4GHz processor, 32GB RAM, and an NVIDIA RTX 4090

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Published in Towards AI

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Written by Lorentz Yeung

Data Analyst in Microsoft, Founder of El Arte Design and Marketing, Certified Digital Marketer, MSc in Digital Marketing, London based.

Responses (4)

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The "censorship" that is alleged to be forbidden by the Chinese government is easily jail broken.
The following is a prompt and response that I executed on my Mac Mini M4 Pro using the Deepseek-R1 32b model downloaded from Ollama. See for yourself:
>>>…

It seems I am not alone; I also prefer the 32B much more after using it for a month.

I used #10 on DeepSeek R1 distill Llama 8b and got very unbiased discussion. A no point was there evident hesitation during the thought process. Later I added 64 to the list and disclosed that it was related to a Chinese historical event, but still…