Also, the release of R1 under the MIT license means that in principle anyone can use R1 to generate synthetic training sets for improving other (non-reasoning) models. This may be a real game changer.

The one fly in the ointment is that Deepseek didn’t deign to share details of their synthetic data generation procedure. But they are already way more transparent than any other non-academic AI lab, so it’s hard to get mad at them over this.

Try it out for yourself: https://chat.deepseek.com/

It can understand LaTeX as well as outputting it. In my limited testing on sample physics problems, it performs pretty well. It also scored 100% on the 2023 A Level maths exam.

It’s MIT licensed, so anyone is free to go about decensoring it. There are already “abliterated” (decensored) variants uploaded to huggingface, at least for the distilled models.

This procedure also decensors stuff that western models routinely censor. So ironically these Chinese open source models are giving us the most free speech friendly LLMs around.