deepseek
1.5B parameters
Commercial OK

DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B

Smallest R1 distill. Surprisingly capable reasoning at 1.5B for its size class; right pick when you need reasoning AND edge deployment.

License: Apache 2.0·Released Jan 20, 2025·Context: 131,072 tokens

Overview

Smallest R1 distill. Surprisingly capable reasoning at 1.5B for its size class; right pick when you need reasoning AND edge deployment.

Family & lineage

How this model relates to others in its lineage. Family members share architecture and training-data roots; parent / children edges record direct distillation or fine-tune relationships.

Strengths

  • Reasoning at edge / phone tier
  • Apache 2.0

Weaknesses

  • 1.5B is the hard ceiling on reasoning depth

Quantization variants

Each quantization trades model quality for file size and VRAM. Q4_K_M is the most popular starting point.

QuantizationFile sizeVRAM required
Q4_K_M1.0 GB2 GB

Get the model

HuggingFace

Original weights

huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B

Source repository — direct quantization required.

Hardware that runs this

Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B.

Compare alternatives

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Frequently asked

What's the minimum VRAM to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B?

2GB of VRAM is enough to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B at the Q4_K_M quantization (file size 1.0 GB). Higher-quality quantizations need more.

Can I use DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B commercially?

Yes — DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B ships under the Apache 2.0, which permits commercial use. Always read the license text before deployment.

What's the context length of DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B?

DeepSeek R1 Distill Qwen 1.5B supports a context window of 131,072 tokens (about 131K).

Source: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Qwen-1.5B

Reviewed by RunLocalAI Editorial. See our editorial policy for how we research and verify model claims.