But there is a big difference, llama is still way behind chatgpt and one of the key reasons to open source it could have been to use open source community to catch up with chatgpt. Deepseek on contrary is already at par with chatgpt.

Llama is being gpt4 because they are releasing models 1/50th to 1/5th the size.

R1 is a 650b monster no one can run locally.

This is like complaining an electric bike inky goes up to 80km/h

R1 distills are still very very good. I've used Llama 405b and I would say dsr1-32b is about the same quality, or maybe a bit worse (subjectively within error) and the 70b distill is better.

What hardware do you need to be able to run them?

The distils run on the same hardware as the llama models they are based on llama models anyway.

The full version... If you have to ask you can't afford it.

Yea no shit, that's because meta is behind and Noone would care about them if it wasn't open source

Right, so it sounds like it's working then given how much people are starting to care about them in this sphere.

We can laugh at that (like I like to do with everything from Facebook's React to Zuck's MMA training), or you can see how others (like Deepseek and to a lesser extent, Mistral, and to an even lesser extent, Claude) are doing the same thing to help themselves (and each other) catch up. What they're doing now, by opening these models, will be felt for years to come. It's draining OpenAI's moat.

How's that old chestnut go? "First they laugh at us..."?