The narrative that OpenAI, Microsoft, and freshly minted White House “AI czar” David Sacks are now pushing to explain why DeepSeek was able to create a large language model that outpaces OpenAI’s while spending orders of magnitude less money and using older chips is that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s data unfairly and without compensation. Sound familiar?
Both Bloomberg and the Financial Times are reporting that Microsoft and OpenAI have been probing whether DeepSeek improperly trained the R1 model that is taking the AI world by storm on the outputs of OpenAI models.
It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.
OpenAI is currently being sued by the New York Times for training on its articles, and its argument is that this is perfectly fine under copyright law fair use protections.
“Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. In its motion to dismiss in court, OpenAI wrote “it has long been clear that the non-consumptive use of copyrighted material (like large language model training) is protected by fair use.”
OpenAI argues that it is legal for the company to train on whatever it wants for whatever reason it wants, then it stands to reason that it doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when competitors use common strategies used in the world of machine learning to make their own models.
DeepSeek’s specific trained model is immaterial—they could take it down tomorrow and never provide access again, and the damage to OpenAI’s business would already be done.
DeepSeek’s model is just a proof-of-concept—the point is that any organization with a few million dollars and some (hopefully less-problematical) training data can now make their own model competitive with OpenAI’s.
Deepseek can't take down the model, it's already been published and is mostly open source. Open source llms are the way, fuck closedAI
Right—by “take it down” I just meant take down online access to their own running instance of it.
I suspect that most usage of the model is going to be companies and individuals running their own instance of it. They have some smaller distilled models based on Llama and Qwen that can run on consumer-grade hardware.
... assuming deepseek is telling the truth, something they have plenty of incentives to lie about
Imagine if a little bit of those so many millions that so many companies are willing to throw away to the shit ai bubble was actually directed to anything useful.