Based on the article (see archive link by bushido), this might actually get very serious. Looks like politician are now involved and I'm sure Altman and Ellison are going to lean hard.

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David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence czar, said Tuesday there’s “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek leaned on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology. In an interview with Fox News, Sacks described a technique called distillation whereby one AI model uses the outputs of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities.

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What are they gonna do, set Tariffs on free software from China?

I suspect the goal is to make it not viable for any company to host the model and provide API services and create a choke point with deepseek.com

This is actually quite serious in my opinion, as running the 671B model is not trivial and I was hoping more vendors would pop up to provide API services.

This is an open-weights model. There is literally nothing that the government can do to stop anyone from hosting the model. People hosting R1 have no relationship with MS or OpenAI. There is no contractual violation, no copyright violation.

> There is literally nothing that the government can do to stop anyone from hosting the model.

I admire your optimism but the simple fact is, you have a person in power that can be easily bribed and you have VERY rich people that stand to lose a lot.

DeepSeek v3 is something I would actually install a VPN for, to get access to it, if it becomes an issue in Canada. It truly is on par with Sonnet and cost 15 times less.

My hope is, people will start to use DeepSeek v3 to do what DeepSeek is accused of having done and by the time things make it to court, it would be too late as there would be no way to say where any of the data came from.

That's not how any of this works. The fear mongering has no basis. Deepseek the company is not related to the weights of the model. The model cannot be outlawed. At worst, you can block Deepseek the company from the app store, cloud providers etc. That has nothing to do with the model.

> Deepseek the company is not related to the weights of the model.

I know the model is there, but running the 671B model would literally not make sense unless you can provide services at scale. The only reason that I, and others care is DeepSeek costs 15 times less than Sonnet. Stopping DeepSeek from offering their service at that price is the whole point of why OpenAI and Microsoft is now serious about all of this.

I believe the goal is to prevent any other provider from providing the models as an API service. OpenAI and Anthropic charge as much as they do because they bake in high salaries and R&D. With the weights freely available, the only cost is just hardware and support staff.

As far as Ive seen there's already at least 4 alternative providers out there and that's within days of release. Then there's all the distillations and all the projects to rebuild it. It's not trivial to run it but also nowhere near a significant barrier, especially if it's for personal use. There's another thread here where someone else ran the full model on a beefy Hetzner server. Most people on HN could probably accomplish that given a few days at most, some could do it immediately.

At the price point that DeepSeek is charging?

Some of them are close, most are cheaper than Sonnet 3.5, all of them are multiples cheaper than O1.

Yeah I took a look at some of them and they are okay. I may need to switch to them as DeepSeek doesn't look like they can keep up with demand.

Surely,any minute now the free market of ideas will have the invisible hand throw invisible fingers.

300%

so far, OpenAi holds no copyright over those outputs, and even if they did, its fair use to train on them.

T&C violations at the worst?

Who knows with the Trump administration and their stacked Supreme court. I'm guessing what is going to be debated is not so much the data itself, but the means of obtaining the data. Basically there was breach of contract somewhere.

why would the Chinese pay any attention to a foreign court?

especially on a matter of national interest

a US court has no ability to enforce its judgement on Chinese actions in China

This isn't about the China now. This is about preventing people from providing/using DeepSeek. Basically, this is about ensuring DeepSeek only has a market in China or in other China friendly countries.

Tech advances race ahead of legal systems.

By the time the law adapts and can target DeepSeek, DeepSeek and others will be 2 generations ahead using different paradigms that render the new laws obsolete.

OAI hasn't exposed the CoT trace in the API. Just using OAI for creating more Q&A pairs, while slightly questionable, is neither controvertial nor a big issue.

(if this was substantially large, OAI would already know from the API bills).

Did you read the article? The amount of data taken was enough to trip wires.

Microsoft’s security researchers in the fall observed individuals they believe may be linked to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI application programming interface, or API.

Exfiltrate is a very strong word to use when they paid for the data just like OpenAI and Microsoft wanted them to.

Well, it looks like the ball is in the politicians' court right now, and who knows where this will lead. I said it in another comment, but I hope others in China and around the world will start to use v3 to build better models and by the time any legislation comes into play, it would be too late.

As noted "exfiltration" doesn't say anything other than maybe that they broke the ToS.

There's no Chain-of-Thought trace available in OpenAI; and so all this FuD about DeepSeek's technical achievement, which achieves this completely via RL, is for nought.

Westerners have this annoying habbit of framing their irrational hate for other groups (typ. racial) as some sort of righteous/moral stand.

I don't care for this non-sense since I'm not part of this game.