It's been confirmed to run on a machine with no internet access. So it isn't reliant on external requests, though it could still be trying to make them.
I've done this (not thoroughly by any means) with OpenSnitch on the Ubuntu machine I have ollama installed on running the 32b R1 weights. No network traffic.
I'm not entirely sure if it is possible to do some type of code execution like that in just the weights themselves, though someone else who knows a bit more about this can weigh in here.
At least a TB of VRAM to load it in fp16. They distilled to smaller models, which do not perform as well, but can be run on a single GPU. Full R1 is big though.
Yeah, I would want to double check and confirm they're using safe serialization methods at the very least before using the weights from any model released by a Chinese entity