There is no “fundamentally” here, you are referring to some abstraction that doesn’t exist. The models are modified during the fine-tuning process, and the process trains them to learn to adopt DeepSeek R1’s reasoning technique. You are acting like there is some “essence” underlying the model which is the same between the original Qwen and this model. There isn’t. It is a hybrid and its own thing. There is no such thing as “base capability,” the model is not two separate pieces that can be judged independently. You can only evaluate the model as a whole. Your comment is just incredibly bizarre to respond to because you are referring to non-existent abstractions and not actually speaking of anything concretely real.

The model is neither Qwen nor DeepSeek R1, it is DeepSeek R1 Qwen Distill as the name says. it would be like saying it’s false advertising to say a mule is a hybrid of a donkey and a horse because the “base capabilities” is a donkey and so it has nothing to do with horses, and it’s really just a donkey at the end of the day. The statement is so bizarre I just do not even know how to address it. It is a hybrid, it’s its own distinct third thing that is a hybrid of them both. The model’s capabilities can only be judged as it exists, and its capabilities differ from Qwen and the original DeepSeek R1 as actually scored by various metrics.

Speaking of its “base capabilities” is a meaningless floating abstraction which cannot be empirically measured and doesn’t refer to anything concretely real. It only has its real concrete capabilities, not some hypothetical imagined capabilities.