New Business
Is DeepSeek’s AI ‘distillation’ theft? OpenAI seeks answers over China’s breakthrough
Since Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) start-up DeepSeek rattled Silicon Valley and Wall Street with its cost-effective models, the company has been accused of data theft through a practice that is common across the industry.
OpenAI said it has evidence that DeepSeek used “distillation” of its GPT models to train the open-source V3 and R1 models at a fraction of the cost of what Western tech giants are spending on their own models, the Financial Times reported on Wednesday. OpenAI and Microsoft, the ChatGPT maker’s biggest backer, have started investigating whether a group linked to DeepSeek exfiltrated large amounts of data through an application programming interface (API) in the autumn, Bloomberg reported, citing people familiar with the matter.
Distillation is a means of training smaller models to mimic the behaviour of larger, more sophisticated models. The practice is common internally at many companies looking to scale down the size of their models while offering similar performance to users. This combined with the fact that model training often relies on a lot of data of questionable provenance has led some experts to question OpenAI’s sincerity in its accusations of intellectual property infringement.
“Distillation will violate most terms of service, yet it’s ironic – or even hypocritical – that Big Tech is calling it out. Training ChatGPT on Forbes or New York Times content also violated their terms of service,” Lutz Finger, a senior visiting lecturer at Cornell University who has worked in AI at tech companies including Google and LinkedIn, said in an emailed statement. “Knowledge is free and hard to protect.”
DeepSeek has its own distilled models that use other open-source models such as Meta Platforms’ Llama and Alibaba Group Holding’s Qwen. Alibaba owns the South China Morning Post.
Source link
