OpenAI prohibits the practice of training a new AI model by repeatedly querying a larger, pre-trained model, a technique commonly referred to as distillation, according to their terms of use. And the company suspects DeepSeek may have tried something similar, which could be a breach of its terms.
Even as ChatGPT creator OpenAI faces a barrage of copyright infringement cases in some countries, the company believes that its upstart Chinese rival DeepSeek may have copied from its artificial intelligence (AI) technology. Not just OpenAI, but one of US President Donald Trump’s top advisors has also levelled this claim, without yet presenting much evidence.
DeepSeek’s entry into the AI space – touted for being open source, its accuracy and claims that its built at fraction of the cost as its US competitors – have caused an upheaval in the technology industry. It has sent Nvidia’s stock on a downward spiral, since their model was trained on inferior graphics processing unites (GPUs) compared to what the likes of OpenAI have access to. And its entry has reignited the conversation around stricter export controls.
It is in this context that OpenAI has said that DeepSeek may have used a technique called “distillation,” which allows its model to learn from a pretrained model, in this case ChatGPT. While DeepSeek has been accused of intellectual property theft ever since it gained mainstream attention, some industry experts have dismissed these claims saying they stem from an inadequate understanding of how models such as DeepSeek are trained.
Students at Taranaki's largest tertiary education provider are stunned it is threatened with closure. As the government unwinds Te Pūkenga, the Western Institute of Technology at Taranaki - known as WITT - has been given a year to shape-up or face merger or even closure.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has increasingly become part of everyday life over the past decade. It is used for everything from personalising social media feeds to powering medical breakthroughs. But as big tech firms and governments vie to be at the forefront of AI's development, critics have expressed caution over its potential misuse, ethical complexities and environmental impact.
