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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

#961
post #561

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. S…

The identity issue is not an evidence at all. It is the easiest thing to clean from data, if you are actually distilling GPT-4, that would be the first thing you do to remove those data samples.

It is predicting next token, are we really taking its words and think the model knows what it is saying?

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

#962

There is a lot of discussion here about IP theft. Honest question, from deepseek's point of view as a company under a different set of laws than US/Western -- was there IP theft? A company like OpenAI can put whatever licensing they want in place. But that only matters if they can enforce it. The question is, can they enforce it against deepseek? Did deepseek do something illegal under the laws of their originating c…

Agree that US is at a disadvantage for innovation because of lawsuits, wonder if it will eventually lead to US becoming 2nd place of innovation.

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

#963

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the "our IP" argument is ridiculous. What they are doing is stealing data from all over the web, without people's consent for that data to be used in training ML models. If anything, then "Open"AI should be sued and forced to publish their whole product. The people should demand knowing exactly what is going on with their data. Also still an unresolved issue is how they will ever comply with a deletion reque…

They can still have IP while using copyrighted training materials - the actual model source code. But DeepSeek didn't use that presumably (since it's secret). They definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.

> Only works with human authors can receive copyrights, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said[1]

IANAL but it seems to me that OpenAI wouldn’t be able to claim their outputs are IP since they are AI-generated. It may be against their TOS, meaning OpenAI could refuse to provide service to DeepSeek in the future, but they can’t really sue them.

[1]: https://www.reuters.com/legal/ai-generated-art-cannot-receiv...

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

#964

There is a lot of discussion here about IP theft. Honest question, from deepseek's point of view as a company under a different set of laws than US/Western -- was there IP theft? A company like OpenAI can put whatever licensing they want in place. But that only matters if they can enforce it. The question is, can they enforce it against deepseek? Did deepseek do something illegal under the laws of their originating c…

The most interesting part is that China has been ahead of the US in AI for many years, just not in LLMs. You need to visit mainland China and see how AI applications are everywhere, from transport to goods shipping. I'm not surprised at all. I hope this in the end makes the US kill its strict IP laws, which is the problem. If the US doesn't, China will always have a huge edge on it, no matter how much NVidia hardware…

My understanding is that not having H100s is irrelevant because most Chinese companies can partner or just own companies in say Australia that can load up on H100s in their data centers in Australia and "rent them out" or offer a service to the Chinese parent company.

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

#965

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok was now that a precedent has been set ? Can't really ban what can be downloaded for free and hosted by anyone. There are many providers hosting the ~700B parameter version that aren't CCP aligned.

> Can't really ban what can be downloaded for free and hosted by anyone. Like music? They banned napster

Napster was one of thousands, if not 10s of thousands of similar services for music download.

And this analogy isn't particularly good. Napster was the server, not the product. Whether you got XYZ from Napster or wherever else doesn't matter, because its the product that you are after, not the way to get the product.

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

#966
post #4

How would they prove they used it’s model. I would be curious to know their methodology. Also what legal actions OpenAI can take? can DeepSeek be banned in US?

If you read the article (which I know no one does anymore)

>OpenAI and its partner Microsoft investigated accounts believed to be DeepSeek’s last year that were using OpenAI’s application programming interface (API) and blocked their access on suspicion of distillation that violated the terms of service, another person with direct knowledge said. These investigations were first reported by Bloomberg.

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

#967

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually the "our IP" argument is ridiculous. What they are doing is stealing data from all over the web, without people's consent for that data to be used in training ML models. If anything, then "Open"AI should be sued and forced to publish their whole product. The people should demand knowing exactly what is going on with their data. Also still an unresolved issue is how they will ever comply with a deletion reque…

They can still have IP while using copyrighted training materials - the actual model source code. But DeepSeek didn't use that presumably (since it's secret). They definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.

> [OpenAI] definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.

Well, they can argue that, if they're fine with being hypocrites.

They're hypocrites.

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

#968
Reminds me of this quote by Bill Gates to Steve Jobs, when Jobs accused Gates of stealing the idea for a mouse:

> "Well, Steve… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."

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

#969
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.

This has been in the back of my head since the news broke. Has anyone built their own R1 from scratch and validated it?

not the whole model obviously since it just came out. but people have been successful in replicating the core RL principle behind it.

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

#970
post #444

This reminds me of a (probably apocryphal) story about fast food chains that made the rounds decades ago: McDonald's invests tons of time into finding the best real estate for new stores; Burger King just opens stores near McDonalds!

About 15 years ago, as CVS Pharmacy expanded into their new, stand-alone properties (in our region), Walgreen's Pharmacy started appearing across the street almost instantaneously. I've seen it happen at 4 separate locations so most certainly not coincidence -- so I believe it :)
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