Running DeepSeek R1 locally

[chants]

Censorship update: it appears if you download models and run locally there is no censorship.

Censoring is definitely done on their public website if you run your queries on their hardware. Here is how it works:
when you send your query it goes into the real model avatars thinking or generating a response.

At the same time, it is sent to a classifier model that is far cheaper, faster and specific. This classifier is trained with a prompt similar to "is the following '<prompt>' related to the following list of sensitive topics". If it returns yes, the main query is immediately aborted and a message displayed. Sometimes you can see it start to think and cut off a few sentences into it's deepthink. Other time it cuts off so fast that it appears nothing yet was emitted.

No problem, run it locally, you won't deal with the censorship classifier. It would be interesting though to have a list of the sensitive topics but that is probably kept secretly and securely.

Update: According to this article I am mistaken and the censorship concerns mentioned are legit:

https://techcrunch.com/2025/02/03/no-deepseek-isnt-uncensored-if-you-run-it-locally/