Did the upstart Chinese tech company DeepSeek copy ChatGPT to make the artificial intelligence technology that shook Wall Street this week?
That's what ChatGPT maker OpenAI is suggesting, along with U.S. President Donald Trump's top AI adviser. Neither has disclosed specific evidence of intellectual property theft, but the comments could fuel a reexamination of some of the assumptions that led to a panic in the U.S. over DeepSeek's advancements.
"There's substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's models," David Sacks, Trump's AI adviser, told Fox News on Tuesday. "And I don't think OpenAI is very happy about this."
DeepSeek and the hedge fund it grew out of, High-Flyer, didn't immediately respond to emailed questions Wednesday, the start of China's extended Lunar New Year holiday.
OpenAI said in a statement that China-based companies "are constantly trying to distill the models of leading U.S. AI companies" but didn't publicly call out DeepSeek specifically.
OpenAI's official terms of use ban the technique known as distillation that enables a new AI model to learn by repeatedly querying a bigger one that's already been trained. The company has been working with its business partner Microsoft to identify accounts attempting to distill its models and then banning those accounts and revoking their access. Microsoft declined to comment.
OpenAI said it will also work "closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take U.S. technology."
The San Francisco company has itself been accused of copyright theft in lawsuits from media organizations, book authors and others in cases that are still working through courts in the U.S. and elsewhere.
Even before DeepSeek news rattled markets Monday, many who were trying out the company's AI model noticed a tendency for it to declare that it was ChatGPT or refer to OpenAI's terms and policies.
"If you ask it what model are you, it would say, 'I'm ChatGPT,' and the most likely reason for that is that the training data for DeepSeek was harvested from millions of chat interactions with ChatGPT that were just fed directly into DeepSeek's training data," said Gregory Allen, a former U.S. Defense Department official who now directs the Wadhwani AI Center at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Such declarations are not necessarily an indication of IP theft -- chatbots are prone to fabricating information. But DeepSeek, despite describing its technology as "open-source," doesn't disclose the data it used to train its model.
"I think that there's a pretty obvious reason for that choice, which is that they harvested ChatGPT for training data," Allen said.
Much about DeepSeek has perplexed analysts poring through the startup's public research papers about its new model, R1, and its precursors.
Among the details that startled Wall Street was DeepSeek's assertion that the cost to train the flagship v3 model behind its AI assistant was only $5.6 million, a stunningly low number compared to the multiple billions of dollars spent to build ChatGPT and other popular chatbots.
The $5.6 million number only included actually training the chatbot, not the costs of earlier-stage research and experiments, the paper said. But the number -- and DeepSeek's relatively cheap prices for developers -- called into question the huge amounts of money and electricity pouring into AI development in the U.S.
DeepSeek was also working under constraints: U.S. export controls on the most powerful AI chips. It said it relied on a relatively low-performing AI chip from California chipmaker Nvidia that the U.S. hasn't banned for sale in China. But in 2022, a social media post from High-Flyer said it had amassed a cluster of 10,000 more powerful Nvidia chips that are now banned in China.
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