AI giant OpenAI claims it has evidence DeepSeek used its work to develop its seemingly revolutionary DeepSeek AI models released earlier this month. It says Microsoft’s security team has identified a group with links to DeepSeek that ran large amounts of data through OpenAI's APIs.
Such data transfer would happen with any company using OpenAI to power its own intelligence software. However, distillation is against OpenAI's terms of service. OpenAI is estimated to have spent $80m to $100m (£64m to £80m) developing its GPT-4 AI model, while DeepSeek’s white paper on the development of its latest models provides a lower estimate of costs of just $6m (£4.8m).
This is based on the market rate for the compute time needed for the training, not the full cost to the business, but demonstrates the benefits of DeepSeek’s approach regardless. Tech investor David Sacks, recently appointed as Donald Trump’s AI and crypto czar, told Fox News he believes “it’s possible” IP theft was involved in DeepSeek’s development. He says there is “substantial evidence” distillation was used.
OpenAI has been sued by multiple newspapers, book publishers, music rights organisations, authors and other media bodies across the world for the way its AI steals human-made content in the training process. OpenAI has previously admitted its generative AI tools could not exist without the use of copyright materials, for which it has not paid.
