DeepSeek gives Europe's tech firms a chance to catch up

Just to confirm, Ollama's naming is very confusing on this. Only the `deepseek-r1:671b` model on Ollama is actually deepseek-r1. The other smaller quants are a distilled version based on llama.

https://ollama.com/library/deepseek-r1

The press and news are talking about R1 while what you've been testing is the "distilled" version.

Sadly, Ollama has a bit of a confusing messaging about this, and it isn't super obvious you're not actually testing the model that "comes close to GPT-4o" or whatever the tagline is, but instead testing basically completely different models. I think this can explain the mismatch in expectation vs reality here.

You are hard to impress. Running a 1/20x sized version locally that would be sci fi level 10 years ago.

For such small models I would recommend specialized models only. Like Deep Seek Coder. But I think that one is lagging behind the state of art now.

>What am I missing?

Like everything. You do not even mention your machine spec, so I'm assume you just pick the ones that fit, which probably the quant versions.

Quant versions of the "small" models do not perform that well. Not the way you expected them to be.

I tried that distill, plus the "original" at chat.deepseek.com and the Azure-hosted replica on a simple coding problem (https://taoofmac.com/space/blog/2025/01/29/0900), and all three were bad, but not that bad. I suspect the distill will freak out with very little context.

The distilled versions are terrible and the full version seems very slow, but the latter is certainly in o1’s league.

Did you try: https://chat.deepseek.com/

Do other models do well for the same use cases? I thought LLMs are only good for low-value adtech codes and resources accessible on public Internet, like tons of getters/setters and onEvent triggers without much CS elements or time or multi domain implications.

They're also hyper sensitive to what I'd describe as geometric congruency between input and output: your input has to be able to be decompressed into final form with basically zero IQ spent on it, as if the input were zipped version of as yet existing output that the LLM simply macro-expanded.

R1 is just an improved LLM, nothing groundbreaking in those specific areas. Common limitations of LLMs still apply.

IMO, the layman's model of LLM should be more of predictive text than AI. It's a super fast keyboard that types faster than, not better than, your fingers.

You're right: Republican Senator Hawley introduced that bill Friday. https://www.hawley.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/Haw...

New reasons I never thought I'd have to have to use a VPN. Italy already banned DS by the way.

I imagine if lets say Hetzner were to offer hosted DeepSeek they would be forced out of the US market, no longer be allowed to even buy NVIDIA. That is a high-risk, assuming EU companies would ever even chose to switch to Hetzner over Azure/etc., which they won't. The EU is acting like and ruled by people who believe the US isn't an hostile entity, that attitude is never going to change and the biggest reason why AI in the EU is dead.

In general, in all related to CS and software the UK is ages ahead of the mainland Europe. Also in AI. But still of course way behind US.

It's not an AI specific thing. The UK's investment in harder science/tech seems to be seriously anemic.

Every job posting I see seems to be some variation on the theme of pumping some representation of money around or retail/ecomm/HR management.

DeepMind has made some really amazing stuff.

The UK will need to be an AI hotspot if we want to continue being a financial centre.

The government wants to introduce a law to make it illegal to possess AI tools that are capable of CSAM output. As we know this is impossible, any company starting in the UK with AI will likely fail compared to other countries if this law passes.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c8d90qe4nylo

We have the talent, but lack the vision to ever build something significant.

Founders are more likely to want to tackle smaller problems with a more secure business model.

Investors are much less likely to back high-risk/high-reward speculative business propositions.

Government will insist that we need to go slow and steady and prioritise goals like inclusivity and safety over performance.

The public will be sceptical of any large AI company, especially if they're pushing regulatory boundaries, and demand government intervention.

They did brexit and started mattering even less than they already did: Not at all.

DeepMind - the company owned by Google, but behind things like AlphaFold is based on London. And one of the fathers of modern AI - leading the resurgence of research into neural nets - Geoffrey Hinton is British-Canadian.

He moved from Britain originally due to the difficulty in getting his research funded.

So the issue isn't one of intellectual capital - and while it's obviously the case that well place monetary capital is an issue - it's not clear to me what the real underlying issue is.

Perhaps Europe needs a tech/industrial revolution again - where the power shifts from the old guard to the new. Perhaps too many people in charge in Europe are from a certain class that studied history at university.

We both know that's not gonna happen. Europe is way too entrenched in its ways by this point. The good ol' glory days that brought in Airbus and Concorde are gone and not transferrable to the modern, dynamic and very internationally competitive SW world, nor are its leaders strong and motivated enough to enact policy changes that favor disruption of the old money guard at the expense of the status quo. Case in point we have no SW giants, no Airbus equivalent of the SW world. All Europe's giants are decades to centuries old. 20 years ago EU's GDP was on par with the US's, now we're only half the US's GDP. We're cooked.

Plus, we first have to prioritize solving more urgent and important topics like affordable housing (WHEN?!), the collapsing pension and welfare systems which is a ticking timebomb, cheap energy, collapsing demographic (see affordable housing), illegal immigration, Putin's war next door, the rise of the right wing (see illegal immigration) before jumping into another pissing contest with the US and China on something that's not gonna help fix the pressing issues we have right fucking now. I don't see how we can recover from this downward spiral when I look at the inactions of our politicians who are just kicking the can down the road and blaming the EU and other countries of the union for their own systemic failures.

Winning the AI race might sound cool but it might also be similar to winning the race to the moon: a cool flex but not super useful to the general population if they can't afford a place to live or getting healthcare in a timely manner. Until ChatGPT can wipe your retired old ass in a care home I doubt many people will see AI investments as being a top priority.

DeepSeek API has also been down for over a week now, so does this even mean anything?

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Besides Mistral there are a bunch of smaller "research" models like https://huggingface.co/Almawave/Velvet-14B (Italian) and https://huggingface.co/projecte-aina/aguila-7b (Spanish/Catalan), but as far I'm aware, nothing that really competes with OpenAI/DeepSeek so far (which tbh, I don't think Google does at this time either? None of their models I've tried even came close to GPT4)

No, I don't think so.

I think most of the work done in AI here is focused on current applications of AI not on the development of new AI.

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China and US obviously but first EU needs to be shaken out of complacency. It’s brewing slowly, but as all risk, it’s slow until it isn’t. Shutting down nuclear, outsourcing all tech and manufacturing, overregulation and allowing to be taken over by culture of lazy (and lazy cultures) are all fixable, but it takes time, which is running out.