TBF you almost certainly can’t run R1 itself. The model is way too big and compute intensive for a typical system. You can only run the distilled versions which are definitely a bit worse in performance.

Lots of people (if not most people) are using the service hosted by Deepseek themselves, as evidenced by the ranking of Deepseek on both the iOS app store and the Google Play store.

Part of this was an optimization that was necessary due to their resource restrictions. Chinese firms can only purchase H800 GPUs instead of H200 or H100. These have much slower inter-GPU communication (less than half the bandwidth!) as a result of export bans by the US government, so this optimization was done to try and alleviate some of that bottleneck. It’s unclear to me if this type of optimization would make as big of a difference for a lab using H100s/H200s; my guess is that it probably matters less.