OpenAI, the company behind ChatGPT, has accused DeepSeek, a Chinese AI startup, of misappropriating its technology to accelerate the development of its own artificial intelligence models. Earlier this month, DeepSeek gained attention as a cost-effective alternative to ChatGPT, challenging the United States’ dominance in AI innovation.
Microsoft, a major investor in OpenAI, has also launched an investigation to determine whether DeepSeek’s training data originated from OpenAI and if it was used improperly.
In a statement to Fox News, David Sacks, the newly appointed “AI and crypto czar” under Donald Trump, suggested that DeepSeek may have leveraged OpenAI’s AI models to enhance its own large language model. He claimed, “There’s substantial evidence that DeepSeek distilled knowledge from OpenAI’s models.”
Sacks further noted that leading AI firms are expected to take preventive measures to curb this kind of knowledge distillation, stating, “That would definitely slow down some of these copycat models.”
While the U.S. has imposed restrictions to hinder China’s progress in AI, such as blocking access to NVIDIA’s latest high-performance chips, China appears to be finding ways to circumvent these limitations for now.
In a statement to the BBC, Naomi Haefner, an assistant professor of technology management at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland, questioned whether DeepSeek truly trained its models from scratch. She suggested that the Chinese AI startup may have misappropriated large amounts of data from OpenAI.
If this allegation proves true, DeepSeek’s claims of developing its model at a fraction of OpenAI’s cost could be misleading. However, even if DeepSeek built its AI using OpenAI’s work, it remains uncertain whether the company will face legal consequences, especially since U.S. tech giants like OpenAI, Google, and others have faced similar allegations from artists, content creators, and media publications in the past.
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