As far as I know, the distilling process transfers 'knowledge' from the larger model to the smaller one. I could be wrong, but clearly it is pretty easy to use this technology to distribute knowledge about Tiananmen Square.
> Secondly, most of the censorship is a filter added on top of the model when run through chat.deepseek.com (and I've no idea about system prompt), it is only partially due to the actual model's training data.
Great. I'm talking about the freely distributed model. This thread is about the freely distributed model. Not the hosted version of it. Anyone can put any layer of censorship in front of a hosted model. The actual open source model does not seem to be doing the censoring. Luckily you, or I, can download the original un-distilled model, and run it locally to verify that it will still talk about the same subjects. It will.