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

ft.com

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

#641

Post by hmottestad »

Imnimo wrote: post #504
riantogo wrote: post #461

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 -…

At the pace that DeepSeek is developing we should expect them to surpass OpenAI in not that long.

The big question really is, are we doing it wrong, could we have created o1 for a fraction of the price. Will o4 cost less to train than o1 did?

The second question is naturally. If we create a smarter LLM, can we use it to create another LLM that is even smarter?

It would have been fantastic if DeepSeek could have come out with an o3 competitor before o3 even became publicly available. That way we would have known for sure that we’re doing it wrong. Cause then either we could have used o1 to train a better AI or we could have just trained in a smarter and cheaper way.

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

#642

Post by Davidzheng »

joe_the_user wrote: post #443
thorum wrote: post #125

> “It is (relatively) easy to copy something that you know works,” Altman tweeted. “It is extremely hard to do something new, risky, and difficult when you don’t know if it will work.” The humor/hypocrisy of the situation aside, it does seem to be true that OpenAI is consistently the one coming up with new ideas first (GPT 4, o1, 4o-style multimodality, voice chat, DALL-E, …) and then other companies reproduce their…

The humor/hypocrisy of the situation aside, it does seem to be true that OpenAI is consistently the one coming up with new ideas first (GPT 4, o1, 4o-style multimodality, voice chat, DALL-E, …) and then other companies reproduce their work, and get more credit because they actually publish the research I claim one just can't put the humor/hypocrisy aside that easily. What OpenAI did with the release of ChatGPT is pro…

They RLHF'd first no?

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

#643

Post by dontreact »

riantogo wrote: post #461
Imnimo wrote: 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…

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…

Is there any evidence R1 is better than O1?

It seems like if they in fact distilled then what we have found is that you can create a worse copy of the model for ~5m dollars in compute by training on its outputs.

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

#644

Post by onlyrealcuzzo »

Austiiiiii wrote: post #492
worik wrote: post #431

[flagged]

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)

DeepSeek's technology is out of the bag.

Every LLM provider in the US will be using it to lower OpEx.

One of them is likely to pass those savings along to consumers to gain market share.

Facebook is in the business of providing weights for free.

The idea that we are all doomed unless we immediately migrate to DeepSeek is fantasy.

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

#645

Post by goatlover »

Sophira wrote: post #617
riantogo wrote: post #461

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…

Honestly, it's kind of silly that this technology is in the hands of companies whose only aim is to make money, IMO.

It's because they're the ones who could raise the money to make those models. Academics don't have access to that kind of compute. But the free models exist.

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

#646

Post by da_chicken »

zombiwoof wrote: post #640
Imnimo wrote: post #504

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 -…

Exactly. They piggybacked of lots of compute and used less. There still is a total sum of a massive amount of compute

I mean, yes that's how progress works. Has OpenAI got a patent? If not it's fair game.

We don't make people figure out how to domesticate a cow every time they want a hamburger. Or test hundreds of thousands of filaments before they can have a lightbulb. Inventions, once invented, exist as giants to stand upon. The inventor can either choose to disclose the invention and earn a patent for exclusive rights, or they can try to keep it a secret and hope nobody reverse engineers it.

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

#647

Post by el_cujo »

joe_the_user wrote: post #475
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.

If Deepseek trained off OpenAI, then it wasn't trained from scratch for "pennies on the dollar" If OpenAI trained on the intellectual property of others, maybe it wasn't the creativity breakthrough people claim? Oppositely If you say ChatGPT was trained on "whatever data was available", and you say Deepseek was trained "whatever data was available", then they sound pretty equivalent. All the rough consensus language…

I'm not an OpenAI apologist and don't like what they've done with other people's intellectual property but I think that's kind of a false equivalency. OpenAI's GPT 3.5/4 was a big leap forward in the technology in terms of functionality. DeepSeek-r1 isn't really a huge step forward in output, it's mostly comparable to existing models, one thing that is really cool about it is it being able to be trained from scratch quickly and cheaply. This is completely undercut if it was trained off of OpenAI's data. I don't care about adjudicating which one is a bigger thief, but it's notable if one of the biggest breakthroughs about DeepSeek-r1 is pretty much a lie. And it's still really cool that it's open source and can be run locally, it'll have that over OpenAI whether or not the training claims are a lie/misleading

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

#649

Post by freehorse »

glenstein wrote: post #550
tasuki wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It is not as if they are not open about how they did it. People are actually working on reproducing their results as they describe in the papers. Somebody has already reproduced the r1-zero rl training process on a smaller model (linked in some comment here).

Even if o1 specifically was used (which is in itself doubtful), it does not mean that this was the main reason that r1 succeeded/it could not have happened without it. The o1 outputs hides the CoT part, which is the most important here. Also we are in 2025, scratch does not exist anymore. Creating better technology building upon previous (widely available) technology has never been a controversial issue.

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

#650

Post by iforgot22 »

freehorse wrote: post #609
iforgot22 wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They might show DeepSeek's model calling itself ChatGPT, which users have already alleged. Same as how Cisco proved Huawei was stealing router code. Except in this case, nothing was stolen, unless they want to call ChatGPT's own training on source data theft too.

ChatGPT outputs are all over the internet. It is harder to prove that deepseek used specifically o1 for training, instead of a lot of chatgpt output ending up in the training set from other sources.

That's a good point, at least for the prompts I saw. Like "do you have an app I can use" is commonly seen with "here's the ChatGPT app" online. And maybe they don't add anything telling Deepseek that it's Deepseek.
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