Sure, but I'm not interested in innocence. They can be as innocent or guilty as they want. But it means they didn't, via engineering wherewithal, reproduce the OpenAI capabilities from scratch. And originally that was supposed to be one of the stunning and impressive (if true) implications of the whole Deepseek news cycle.
Nothing is ever done "from scratch". To create a sandwich, you first have to create the universe.
Yes, there is the question how much ChatGPT data DeepSeek has ingested. Certainly not zero! But if DeepSeek has achieved iterative self-improvement, that'd be huge too!
"From scratch" has a specific definition here though - it means 'from the same or broadly the same corpus of data that OpenAI started with'. The implication was that DeepSeek had created something broadly equivalent to ChatGPT on their own and for much less cost; deriving it from an existing model is a different claim. It's a little like claiming you invented a car when actually you took an existing car and tuned and remodelled it - the end result may be impressive and useful and better than the original, but it's not really a new invention.
No and that's not the point I'm making; cloning the technology is not the same as cloning the data. The claim was that they trained DeepSeek for a fraction of the cost that OpenAI spent training ChatGPT, but if one was trained off the web and the other was trained off the trained data of the first, then it's not a fair comparison.
It is not as if they are not open about how they did it. People are actually working on reproducing their results as they describe in the papers. Somebody has already reproduced the r1-zero rl training process on a smaller model (linked in some comment here).
Even if o1 specifically was used (which is in itself doubtful), it does not mean that this was the main reason that r1 succeeded/it could not have happened without it. The o1 outputs hides the CoT part, which is the most important here. Also we are in 2025, scratch does not exist anymore. Creating better technology building upon previous (widely available) technology has never been a controversial issue.
who cares. even if the claim is true, does that make the open source model less attractive?
in fact, it implies that there is no moat in this game. openai can no longer maintain its stupid valuation, as other companies can just scrape its output and build better models at much lower costs.
everything points to the exact same end result - DeepSeek democratized AI, OpenAI's old business model is dead.
>even if the claim is true, does that make the open source model less attractive?
Yes! Because whether they reproduced those capabilities independently or copying them from relying on downstream data has everything to do with whether they're actually state of the art.
