deepseek
8B parameters
Commercial OK

DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B

R1 reasoning distilled into a Llama 3 8B base. Smaller R1 distill; useful when 32B is too heavy. Reasoning quality is meaningfully below the 32B distill but still beats non-reasoning Llama 8B on math/code.

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

Overview

R1 reasoning distilled into a Llama 3 8B base. Smaller R1 distill; useful when 32B is too heavy. Reasoning quality is meaningfully below the 32B distill but still beats non-reasoning Llama 8B on math/code.

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 model on 8B-class hardware
  • Apache 2.0
  • Llama 3 base — broad runtime support

Weaknesses

  • Reasoning depth limited by base size

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_M4.7 GB6 GB

Get the model

HuggingFace

Original weights

huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B

Source repository — direct quantization required.

Hardware that runs this

Cards with enough VRAM for at least one quantization of DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B.

Compare alternatives

Models worth comparing

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Frequently asked

What's the minimum VRAM to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B?

6GB of VRAM is enough to run DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B at the Q4_K_M quantization (file size 4.7 GB). Higher-quality quantizations need more.

Can I use DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B commercially?

Yes — DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B 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 Llama 8B?

DeepSeek R1 Distill Llama 8B supports a context window of 131,072 tokens (about 131K).

Source: huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B

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