im not an expert at criticism, but I think its fair from their part.

I mean, can you remind me what are the hardware requirements to run deepseek locally?
oh, you need a high-end graphics card with at least 8 GB VRAM for that*? for the highly distilled variants! for more complete ones you need multiple such graphics card interconnected! how do you even do that with more than 2 cards on a consumer motherboard??

how many do you think have access to such a system, I mean even 1 high-end gpu with just 8 GB VRAM, considering that more and more people only have a smartphone nowadays, but also that these are very expensive even for gamers?
and as you will read in the 2nd referenced article below, memory size is not the only factor: the distill requiring only 1 GB VRAM still requires a high-end gpu for the model to be usable.

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/amd-released-instructions-for-running-deepseek-on-ryzen-ai-cpus-and-radeon-gpus

https://bizon-tech.com/blog/how-to-run-deepseek-r1-locally-a-free-alternative-to-openais-o1-model-hardware-requirements#a6

https://codingmall.com/knowledge-base/25-global/240733-what-are-the-system-requirements-for-running-deepseek-models-locally

so my point is that when talking about deepseek, you can't ignore how they operate their online service, as most people will only be able to try that.

I understand that recently it's very trendy, and cool to shit on Proton, but they have a very strong point here.