Its recent Chinese competitor, DeepSeek, may have “inappropriately taken data from its model to spin up its own artificial intelligence chatbot,” according to OpenAI.
On Monday, DeepSeek shocked U.S. markets by releasing an unexpectedly powerful and affordable Large Language Model, or LLM. This caused the stock of Nvidia, the leading U.S. chip manufacturer, to plummet.
OpenAI’s allegation was first published by the Financial Times.
In an emailed statement to NBC News on Wednesday, an OpenAI representative stated that it believes DeepSeek might be one of the anonymous Chinese companies actively attempting to overtake American AI firms using a strategy called distillation, in which an LLM is trained using data produced by another LLM.
The spokeswoman clarified that the business was not accusing DeepSeek of a security violation, saying, “We are aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and we will share information as we know more.”
Although it is popular in the industry, distillation is frequently forbidden in LLMs’ terms of service.
A request for comment from DeepSeek was not answered.
It has been alleged that OpenAI improperly accessed content it did not have permission to use in order to create ChatGPT. Numerous lawsuits have been filed against it along those lines, including one from The New York Times, which alleges that the company’s business model was based on part on its illegal swallowing of millions of the newspaper’s stories.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman congratulated DeepSeek on X on Monday, stating that the company had created an impressive model, especially in terms of what they can do for the price.
The OpenAI representative hinted that the White House might intervene in the conflict.
“We will continue to work closely with the U.S. government to protect the most capable models being built here, and we take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology,” the representative stated.
David Sacks, the AI adviser to President Donald Trump, told Fox News on Tuesday that he thought DeepSeek did extract from OpenAI, but he refrained from saying the White House would respond.
“I believe that one of the things you’ll witness in the coming months is our top AI companies attempting to stop distillation,” he said. Some of these counterfeit versions would undoubtedly slow down as a result.