Deepseek is the company, R1 is an MIT-licensed produce, they have the Qwen models under Apache license.

You can download, modify, run locally. There are many copies online out of Deepseek’s control.

I always hear people say this as a ‘gotcha’ but it doesn’t make any sense.

I have travelled while homeless.

People will be renting an apartment in a developed city, owning a car, going out to pubs/nightclubs, and then telling dirty backpackers, “God must be nice to have the money to travel!”

travel vs sedentism, neither one is necessarily more cheap/expensive than the other