https://www.wired.com/2011/02/bing-copies-google/

They don't care, T&C and copyright is void unless it affects them, others can go kick rocks. Not surprising they and OpenAI will do a legal battle over this.

Well I think DeepSeek releasing it open source and on an MIT license will rally the big talent. The open sourcing of a new technology has always driven progress in the past.

The last paragraph too is where OpenAi seems to be focusing their efforts..

> we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models ..

> ... we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology.

So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok was now that a precedent has been set ?

1. Something I'd expect to happen.

2. Lived through a similar scenario in 2010 or so.

Early in my professional career I've worked for a media company that was scraping other sites (think Craigslist but for our local market) to republish the content on our competing website. I wasn't working on that specific project, but I did work on an integration on my teams project where the scraping team could post jobs on our platform directly. When others started scraping "our content" there were a couple of urgent all hands on deck meetings scheduled, with a high level of disbelief.

The books were all in epub format, converted, cleaned to plain text, and hosted on a public data hoarder site.

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.

Unfortunately for them it’s challenging to profit in the long term from being first in this space and the time it takes for each new idea to be reproduced is getting shorter.

OpenAI talks a lot about the principles of being Open, while still keeping their models closed and not fostering the open source community or sharing their research. Now when a company distills their models using perfectly allowed methods on the public internet, OpenAI wants to shut them down too?

High time OpenAI changes their name to ClosedAI

AI is probably similar where the Moore’s law and advancement will eventually allow people to run open models locally and bring down the cost of operation. Competiition will make it hard for all but one or two players to survive and Nvidia, OpenAI, Deepseek, etc most investments in AI by these large companies will fail to generate substantial wealth but maybe earn some sort of return or maybe not.

That would be a dangerous precedent to establish.

If it's a terms of service violation, I guess they're within their rights to terminate service, but what other recourse do they have?

Other than that, perhaps this is just rhetoric aimed at introducing restrictions in the US, to prevent access to foreign AI, to establish a national monopoly?

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 country?

I've had some limited exposure to media related licensing when releasing content in China and what is allowed is very different than what is permitted in the US.

The interesting part which points to innovation moving outside of the US is US companies are beholden to strict IP laws while many places in the world don't have such restrictions and will be able to utilize more data more easily.

"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 o1-level performance from scratch are not really true" This is at least plausibly a valid claim. The DeepSeek R1 paper shows that distillation is really powerful (e.g. they show Llama models get a huge boost by finetuning on R1 outputs), and if it were the case that DeepSeek were using a bunch of o1 outputs to train their model, that would legitimately cast doubt on the narrative of training efficiency. But that's a separate question from whether it's somehow unethical to use OpenAI's data the same way OpenAI uses everyone else's data.

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.

You might want to consider how it applies to this situation.

It is, of course, quite ironic for OpenAI to indiscriminately scrape the entire web and then complain about being scraped themselves.

[1]: https://searchengineland.com/google-bing-is-cheating-copying...

I don’t buy the argument that distilling from o1 undermines deep seek’s claims around expense at all. Just as open AI used the tools ‘available to them’ to train their models (eg everyone else’ data), r1 is using today’s tools.

Does open AI really have a moral or ethical high ground here?

> We will attempt to directly build safe and beneficial AGI, but will also consider our mission fulfilled if our work aids others to achieve this outcome.

> We will actively cooperate with other research and policy institutions; we seek to create a global community working together to address AGI’s global challenges.

https://openai.com/charter/

/s, we all know what their true mission is...

When I use an API to generate some data, I do not consider the R&D cost to develop the API as part of my costs.

It’s not limited to the models themselves but also OpenAI will probably work towards shutting down access to training data sets also.

imho it’s probably an emergency all hand on deck problem.

My cynical opinion is that the traning corpus has some small amount of data generated by OpenAI, which is probably impossible to avoid at this point, and they are hanging on that thread for dear life.

I don't understand, you mean OpenAI isn't releasing open models and openly publishing their research?

The problem for AI is the hardware is commodified and offers no natural monopoly, so there isn't really anything obvious to vertically integrate-towards-monopoly.

Then all the farmers in the midwest went broke not because they couldn't get their goods to market, but because JP Morgan's consolidated syndicates ate all their margin hauling their goods to market.

Consolidation and monopoly over your competition is always the end goal.

If US is going to proceed with trade war on EU, as it was planning anyway, then DeepSeek will be banned only in US. Seems like term "western countries" is slowly eroding.

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 the US has.

And you know what, Huawei is already making inference hardware... it won't take them long to finally copy the TSMC tech and flip the situation upside down.

When China can make the equivalent of H100s, it will be hilarious because they will sell for $10 in Aliexpress :-)

I understand ToS violations can lead to a ban. OpenAI is free to ban DeepSeek from using their APIs.

It's been known for a while that competitors used OpenAI to improve their models, that's why they changed the TOS to forbid it.

That doesn't mean the deep seek technical achievements are less valid.

Using data from another model won't save you any training time.

Probably won't be Moore's law (which is kind of slowing down) so much as architectural improvements (both on the compute side and the model side - you could say that R1 represents an architectural improvement of efficiency on the model side).

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.

Eventually all future AIs will be produced with synthetic input, the amount of (quality) data we humans can produce is quite limited.

The fact that the input of one AI has been used in the training of another one seems irrelevant.

I claim one just can't put the humor/hypocrisy aside that easily.

What OpenAI did with the release of ChatGPT is productize research that was open and ongoing with Deepmind and other leading at least as much. And everything after that was an extension of the basic approach - improved, expanded but ultimately the same sort of beast. One might even say the situation of OpenAI to DeepMind was like Apple to Xerox. Productizing is nothing to sneeze at - it requires creativity and work to productize basic research. But naturally get end-users who consider the productizers the "fountain heads", who overestimate the productizers because products are all they see.

It's not apparently obvious to me that that is the case.

Ie. do you need a SOTA model to produce a new SOTA model?

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

Xerox could be seen as Google, whose researchers produced the landmark Attention Is All You Need paper, and the general public, who provided all of the training data to make these models possible.

Google Deepmind's recent Gemini 2.0 Flash Thinking is also priced at the new Deepseek level. It's pretty good (unlike previous Gemini models).

[0] https://x.com/deedydas/status/1883355957838897409

[1] https://x.com/raveeshbhalla/status/1883380722645512275

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.