I’ve been able to run distillations of Deepseek R1 up to 70B

Where do you find those?

There is a version of Deepseek R1 “patched” with western values called R1-1776 that will answer topics censored by the Chinese government, however.

Thank you for mentioning this, as I finally confronted my own preconceptions and actually found an article by Perplexity that demonstrated R1 itself has demonstrable pro-China bias.

Although Perplexity’s own description should cause anybody who understands the nature of LLMs to pause. They describe it in their header as a

version of the DeepSeek-R1 model that has been post-trained to provide unbiased, accurate, and factual information.

That’s a bold (read: bullshit) statement, considering the only altered its biases on China. I wouldn’t consider the original model to be unbiased either, but apparently perplexity is giving them a pass on everything else. I guess it’s part of the grand corporate lie that claims “AI is unbiased,” a delusion that perplexity needs to maintain.