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

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

#571
post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why would it cast any doubt? If you can use o1 output to build a better R1. Then use R1 output to build a better X1... then a better X2.. XN, that just shows a method to create better systems for a fraction of the cost from where we stand. If it was that obvious OpenAI should have themselves done. But the disruptors did it. It hindsight it might sound obvious, but that is true for all innovations. It is all good stuf…

I think it would cast doubt on the narrative "you could have trained o1 with much less compute, and r1 is proof of that", if it turned out that in order to train r1 in the first place, you had to have access to bunch of outputs from o1. In other words, you had to do the really expensive o1 training in the first place. (with the caveat that all we have right now are accusations that DeepSeek made use of OpenAI data -…

From the R1 paper

In this study, we demonstrate that reasoning capabilities can be significantly improved through large-scale reinforcement learning (RL), even without using supervised fine-tuning (SFT) as a cold start. Furthermore, performance can be further enhanced with the inclusion of a small amount of cold-start data

Is this cold start data what OpenAI is claiming their output ? If so what's the big deal ?

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

#572

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 idea that they used o1's outputs for their distillation further shows that models like o1 are necessary. Hmm, I think the narrative of the rise of LLMs is that once the output of humans has been distilled by the model, the human isn't necessary. As far as I know, DeepSeek adds only a little to the transformers model while o1/o3 added a special "reasoning component" - if DeepSeek is as good as o1/o3, even taking d…

Some info that may be missing:

- v2/v3 (not r1) seem to be cloned from o1/4o output, and perform worse (this cost the oft-repeated 5ish mm USD)

- r1 is specifically a reasoning step (using RL) _on top of_ v2/v3 and performs similarly to o1 (the cost of this is _not reported anywhere_)

- In the o1 blog post, they specifically say they use RL to add reasoning to LLMs: https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/

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

#573
If true, the question is: did they use ChatGPT outputs to create Deepseek V3 only, or is the R1-zero training process a complete lie (given that the whole premise is that they used pure reinforcement learning)? If they only used ChatGPT output when training V3, then they succeeded in basically replicating the jump from ChatGPT-4o to o1 without any human-labeled CoT (and published the results) - which is a big achievement on its own.

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

#574
post #561

Called it from day 0, impossible to reach that performance with 5M, they had to distill OpenAI (or some other leading foundational model). Got downvoted to oblivion by people who haven't been told what to think by MSM yet. Now it's on FT and everywhere, good, what matters is that truth comes out eventually. I don't take any sides and think what DeepSeek did is fair play, however, what I do find harmful about this is,…

The "evidence" is very weak though: >The San Francisco-based ChatGPT maker told the Financial Times it had seen some evidence of “distillation”, which it suspects to be from DeepSeek. Given that many people have been using ChatGPT to distill their fine-tunes for a few years now, how can they be sure it was specifically DeepSeek? There's, say, glaive.ai whose entire business model is to sell you synthetic datasets, pr…

I agree that the evidence is weak, and even if they had some, they cannot really do anything.

To me, it's just very likely they distilled GPT-4, because:

1) Again, you just cannot get that performance at that cost. And no, what they describe on the paper is not enough to explain the 1,000x-fold decrease in cost.

2) Very often, DeepSeek tells you it's ChatGPT or OpenAI; it's actually quite easy to get it to do that. Some say that's related to "the background radiation on the post-AI internet". I'm not a fentanyl consumer so, unfortunately, I think that argument is trash.

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

#575
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…

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This is cultural prejudice, not racial.

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

#576

This reminds me of the railroads, where once railroads were invented, there was a huge investment boom of eveyrone trying to make money of the railroads, but the competition brought the costs down where the railroads weren’t the people who generally made the money and got the benefit, but the consumers and regular businesses did and competition caused many to fail. AI is probably similar where the Moore’s law and adv…

The railroads drama ended when JP Morgan (the person, not yet the entity) brought all the railroad bosses together, said "you all answer to me because I represent your investors / shareholders", and forced a wave of consolidation and syndicates because competition was bad for business. Then all the farmers in the midwest went broke not because they couldn't get their goods to market, but because JP Morgan's consolida…

This moment was also historically significant because it demonstrated how financial power (Morgan) could control industrial power (the railroads). A pattern that some say became increasingly important in American capitalism.

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

#577
post #431

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And we'd be shooting ourselves in the foot to do so. If America is forced to use only the clunky corporate-owned American AI at a fee, we'll very quickly fall behind competitors worldwide who use DeepSeek models to produce better results for much, much cheaper. Not to mention it'd defeat the whole purpose of a "free market" economy. (Not that that means much of anything anymore)

It never meant anything. There's no such thing as a free market economy. We haven't had one of those in modern times, and arguably human civilization has never had one. Markets and their participants have chronically been subject to information asymmetry, coercion/manipulation, and regulation, among other things.

I don't think all of that is a bad thing (regulation tends to make it harder to do the first two things), but "free markets" are the economic equivalent to the "point mass" in physics: perhaps useful sometimes to create simple models and explanations of things, but will never exist in the real world.

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

#578
post #465
post #320

I think there's two different things going on here: "DeepSeek trained on our outputs and that's not fair because those outputs are ours, and you shouldn't take other peoples' data!" This is obviously extremely silly, because that's exactly how OpenAI got all of its training data in the first place - by scraping other peoples' data off the internet. "DeepSeek trained on our outputs, and so their claims of replicating…

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…

I'd be perfectly fine with China stealing all "our" shit if they just shared it.

The word "our" does a lot of heavy lifting in politics[0]. America is not a commune, it's a country club, one which we used to own but have been bought out of, and whose new owners view us as moochers but can't actually kick us out (yet). It is in competition with another, worse country club that purports to be a commune. We owe neither country club our loyalty, so when one bloodies the other's nose, I smile.

[0] Some languages have a notion of an "exclusive we". If English had such a concept, this would be an exclusive our.

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

#580
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…

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