"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.
