Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

ft.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

541–550 of 1001 posts

Re: OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

#541

Post by sailingparrot »

tensor wrote: post #389
blast wrote: post #374

Everyone is responding to the intellectual property issue, but isn't that the less interesting point? If Deepseek trained off OpenAI, then it wasn't trained from scratch for "pennies on the dollar" and isn't the Sputnik-like technical breakthrough that we've been hearing so much about. That's the news here. Or rather, the potential news, since we don't know if it's true yet.

That's not correct. First of all, training off of data generated by another AI is generally a bad idea because you'll end up with a strictly less accurate model (usually). But secondly, and more to your point, even if you were to use training data from another model, YOU STILL NEED TO DO ALL THE TRAINING. Using data from another model won't save you any training time.

> First of all, training off of data generated by another AI is generally a bad idea because you'll end up with a strictly less accurate model (usually).

That is not true at all.

We have known how to solve this for at least 2 years now.

All the latest state of the art models depend heavily on training on synthetic data.

Re: OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

#542

Post by scotty79 »

JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B wrote: post #516
glenstein wrote: post #220

All the top level comments are basking in the irony of it, which is fair enough. But I think this changes the Deepseek narrative a bit. If they just benefited from repurposing OpenAI data, that's different than having achieved an engineering breakthrough, which may suggest OpenAI's results were hard earned after all.

> OpenAI's results were hard earned after all DDOSing web sites and grabbing content without anyone's consent is not hard earned at all. They did spent billions on their thing, but nothing was earned as they could never do that legally.

More like hard bought and hard stolen.

Re: OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

#546

Post by TheGRS »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #478
rockemsockem wrote: post #467

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the prevailing narrative ATM is that DeepSeek's own innovation was done in isolation and they surpassed OpenAI. Even though in the paper they give a lot of credit to Llama for their techniques. The idea that they used o1's outputs for their distillation further shows that models like o1 are necessary. All of this should have been clear anyway from the start, but that's the Internet for you.

> the prevailing narrative ATM is that DeepSeek's own innovation was done in isolation and they surpassed OpenAI I did not think this, nor did I think this was what others assumed. The narrative, I thought, was that there is little point in paying OpenAI for LLM usage when a much cheaper, similar / better version can be made and used for a fraction of the cost (whether it's on the back of existing LLM research doesn'…

Yes, well the narrative that rocked the stock market is different. Its looking at what DeepSeek did and assuming they may have competitive advantage in this space and could outperform OpenAI at their own game.

If the narrative is actually that DeepSeek can only reach whatever heights OpenAI has already gotten to with some new tricks, then markets will probably refocus on OpenAI's innovations and price things accordingly, even if the initial cost is huge. It also means OpenAI probably needs a better moat to protect its interests.

I'm not sure where the reality is exactly, but market reactions so far have basically followed that initial narrative and now the rebuttal.

Re: OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

#547

Post by 1propionyl »

At this point, the only thing that keeps me using ChatGPT is o1 w/ RAG. The usage limits on o1 are prohibitively tight for regular use, so I have to budget usage to tasks that would benefit there. I also have significant misgivings about their policies around output, which also limit what I can use it for.

For local tasks, the deepseek-r1:14b and deepseek-r1:32b distillations immediately replace most of that usage (prior local models were okay, but not consistently good enough). Once there's a "just works" setup for RAG on par with installing ollama (which I doubt is far of), I don't see much reason to continue paying for my subscription.

Sadly, like many others in this thread, I expect under the current administration to see self-hamstringing protectionism further degrade the US's likelihood of remaining a global powerhouse in this space. Betting the farm on the biggest first-mover who can't even keep up with competition, has weak to non-existent network effects (I can choose a different model or service with a dropdown, they're more or less fungible), has no technological moat and spent over a year pushing apocalyptic scenarios to drum up support for a regulatory moat...

...well it just doesn't seem like a great idea to me.

Re: OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

#548

Post by scotty79 »

sho_hn wrote: post #49

While I'm as amused as everyone else - I think it's technically accurate to point out that the "we trained it for $6 mio" narrative is contingent on the done investment by others.

The opposite, is claiming that OpenAI could have now built better performing, cheaper to run model (when compared to what they published) training it at 1% cost on output of their previous models. ... But they chose not to do it.

Re: OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

#549

Post by htrp »

seanhunter wrote: post #473
827a wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is a third possibility I haven't seen discussed yet: That DeepSeek, illegally, got their hands on an OpenAI model via a breach of OpenAI's systems. Its easy to laugh at OpenAI and say "you reap what you sow", I'm 100% in that camp, but given the lengths other Chinese entities have gone to when it comes to replicating Western technology; we should not discount this. That being said, breaching OAI's systems, re-t…

The reason you’re not seeing that being discussed is it’s totally unsupported by any evidence that’s in the public domain. Unless you have some actual evidence of such a breach, you may as well introduce the possibility that DeepSeek was reverse engineered from data found at an alien crash site.

Why stop there.... Deep seek is actually an alien intelligence sent via sophons to destroy all of particle physics!

Re: OpenAI says it has evidence DeepSeek used its model to train competitor

#550

Post by glenstein »

tasuki wrote: post #364
glenstein wrote: post #220

All the top level comments are basking in the irony of it, which is fair enough. But I think this changes the Deepseek narrative a bit. If they just benefited from repurposing OpenAI data, that's different than having achieved an engineering breakthrough, which may suggest OpenAI's results were hard earned after all.

I understand they just used the API to talk to the OpenAI models. That... seems pretty innocent? Probably they even paid for it? OpenAI is selling API access, someone decided to buy it. Good for OpenAI! I understand ToS violations can lead to a ban. OpenAI is free to ban DeepSeek from using their APIs.

Sure, but I'm not interested in innocence. They can be as innocent or guilty as they want. But it means they didn't, via engineering wherewithal, reproduce the OpenAI capabilities from scratch. And originally that was supposed to be one of the stunning and impressive (if true) implications of the whole Deepseek news cycle.
Post reply on HN