Openai has issued a warning that Chinese emerging companies are developing competing products using DeepSeek technology and the AI model from Chatgpt manufacturer.
Investing $13 billion in SAN Francisco-based AI developers, Openai and their partner Microsoft are now looking into whether their proprietary technology was illegally obtained through a process known as distillation.
The latest chatbot from DeepSeek has caused quite a stir in the market, surpassing free app store rankings in Aping and causing a $1 drop in the market value of US tech stocks related to AI. This impact stems from claims that the AI model behind DeepSeek was trained at a fraction of the cost and hardware used by competitors like Openai and Google.
Openai’s CEO, Sam Altman, initially praised DeepSeek, calling it a “legally active new competitor.”
However, Openai later revealed evidence of “distillation” by a Chinese company, using advanced models to achieve similar results in a specific task by distilling the performance of a smaller model. Openai’s statement did not explicitly mention DeepSeek.
An Openai spokesperson stated, “We are aware that Chinese companies and others are continuously attempting to distill models from major US AI companies. As a leading AI developer, we are taking IP protection measures. Our released models undergo a meticulous process that includes cutting-edge features.”
Openai has faced allegations of training its own models with data unauthorized by publishers or creative industries, and has been actively working to prevent distillation of its models.
The Openai spokesperson emphasized the importance of collaboration with the US government to safeguard their most advanced models from the efforts of enemies and competitors to replicate US technology.
Source: www.theguardian.com
