Does anyone know what kind of HW is required to run it locally? There are instructions but nothing about HW required.
https://huggingface.co/unsloth/DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B-... for example has versions that are 3GB, 4GB, 5GB, 8GB and 16GB.
That 3GB one might work on a CPU machine with 4GB of RAM.
To get good performance you'll want a GPU with that much free VRAM, or an Apple Silicon machine with that much RAM.
There are various ways to run it with lower vram if you're ok with way worse latency & throughput
Edit: sorry this is for v3, the distilled models can be ran on consumer-grade GPUs
But you really don't know the exact numbers until you try, a lot of it is runtime/environment context specific.
My laptop is a cheap laptop from 5 years ago. Not cutting edge hardware.