Welcome to our maker news where we wrap up some fun and interesting stories in the maker world from the last few weeks. The video will come out on Fridays, but we are posting a topic here on Wednesdays to post the video’s sources and to collect any news from the community to potentially include in next week’s as well as just open up general discussion.
This week we looked at:
Chinese-based company Deep Seek released their R1 LLM model with community testing and benchmarks revealing that it seems to beat OpenAI’s best ChatGPT model - which saw a nearly trillion-dollar crash in the stock market. On top of that, R1 is open source under the MIT license, and able to run with server hardware you may find in a home lab. We have also seen it running on regular computers, albeit a little slow unless you have a high-end gaming GPU and lots of RAM (64GB of RAM and a 4080 reportedly gets about 4 tokens/s). This is miles better than the hundred-thousand-dollar server you might need to run something like ChatGPT. It has also had a trickling down effect into smaller and lighter-weight models with even Jeff Geerling running a smaller and less powerful R1 model on a Raspberry Pi (and also running it much faster on a Pi 5 with a GPU). You can give R1 a go online here to judge all of this for yourself.
The 3D printing company Bambu Labs has gone from the golden child to public enemy number one in the online 3d printing community with the announcement of their new authorization control system. Said to be implemented to enhance security, it has been criticized for its restrictive control effectively ensuring that all remotely printed jobs are routed through their cloud services before making it to your printer. Right now this is a bit of an annoyance more than anything with 3rd party slicers having to use Bambu’s Connect service, but there is a bit of a worry here with this slippery slop anti-consumer practice. Let’s hope the community backlash prevents this from going any further.
If you have any news from the maker world, feel free to post it below and we may include it in next week’s video, until then we will see you next week!
