An underwhelming story about trying to run DeepSeek R1 on AWS Free Tier

I chose t3.micro EC2 instance since it's the only one which is free tier eligible.

After setting it up and ssh-in into it, I installed Ollama:

curl -fsSL https://ollama.com/install.sh | sh

Upon installation, I was welcomed with a warning:

>>> Install complete. Run "ollama" from the command line.
WARNING: No NVIDIA/AMD GPU detected. Ollama will run in CPU-only mode.

When I tried to run DeepSeek R1 model with 1.5 billion parameters (the smallest one), I got an error:

$ ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b
Error: model requires more system memory (1.7 GiB) than is available (589.4 MiB)

According to specification, t3.micro has only 1GB RAM:

beyond free tier

Okay, let's spare a few cents and move beyond free tier for the sake of science.

Next, I decided to give t3.small a try which is supposed to have 2GB RAM. The result:

$ ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b
Error: model requires more system memory (1.6 GiB) than is available (1.5 GiB)

Okay, let's give t3.medium with 4GB RAM a try. It finally works, albeit slowly. It took deepseek-r1:1.5b X seconds to incorrectly answer to the following prompt:

time ollama run deepseek-r1:1.5b "How many r's in 'strawberry'?"

Output:

<think>
First, I'll start by examining the word "strawberry."

Next, I need to identify all the vowels present in this word. Vowels are letters that are typically considered sounds made with a single vowel or as an isolated vowel.

Looking at each letter:
- 's' is not a vowel.
- 't' is also not a vowel.
- 'r' is a consonant, not a vowel.
- The next 'a' is a vowel.

I'll check the rest of the letters to ensure I haven't missed any vowels. There are no other vowels in "strawberry."

In total, there's only one vowel present in the word.
</think>

To determine how many **r's** are in the word "strawberry," let's break it down step by step:

1. **Identify Each Letter:**
   - s
   - t
   - r
   - w
   - a
   - n
   - d
   - r

2. **Locate the 'r's:**
   - The first letter is **'s'**.
   - The next letter is **'t'**.
   - Then comes **'r'**, which is the first vowel in the word and an **'r'** that appears later on.

3. **Count the 'r's:**
   - There are two instances of **'r'** in "strawberry":
     1. The letter immediately after the start of the word.
     2. The second letter from the end of the word.

Therefore, the number of **'r's** in "strawberry" is:

\[
\boxed{2}
\]


real    1m11.212s
user    0m0.051s
sys 0m0.044s