The narrative that OpenAI, Microsoft, and freshly minted White House “AI czar” David Sacks are now pushing to explain why DeepSeek was able to create a large language model that outpaces OpenAI’s while spending orders of magnitude less money and using older chips is that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s data unfairly and without compensation. Sound familiar?
Both Bloomberg and the Financial Times are reporting that Microsoft and OpenAI have been probing whether DeepSeek improperly trained the R1 model that is taking the AI world by storm on the outputs of OpenAI models.
It is, as many have already pointed out, incredibly ironic that OpenAI, a company that has been obtaining large amounts of data from all of humankind largely in an “unauthorized manner,” and, in some cases, in violation of the terms of service of those from whom they have been taking from, is now complaining about the very practices by which it has built its company.
OpenAI is currently being sued by the New York Times for training on its articles, and its argument is that this is perfectly fine under copyright law fair use protections.
“Training AI models using publicly available internet materials is fair use, as supported by long-standing and widely accepted precedents. We view this principle as fair to creators, necessary for innovators, and critical for US competitiveness,” OpenAI wrote in a blog post. In its motion to dismiss in court, OpenAI wrote “it has long been clear that the non-consumptive use of copyrighted material (like large language model training) is protected by fair use.”
OpenAI argues that it is legal for the company to train on whatever it wants for whatever reason it wants, then it stands to reason that it doesn’t have much of a leg to stand on when competitors use common strategies used in the world of machine learning to make their own models.
Intellectual property theft for me but not for thee!
It’s a shame that you can’t copyright the output of AI, isn’t it?
Trump executive order on the copyrightability of AI output in 3…
so? it won’t have any effect on china, because last i checked, us laws apply only in the us
everyone concerned about their privacy going to china-- look at how easy it is to get it from the hands of our overlord spymasters who’ve already snatched it from us.
I can’t believe we’re still on this nonsense about AI stealing data for training.
I’ve had this argument so many times before y’all need to figure out which data you want free and which data do you want to pay for because you can’t have it both ways.
Either the data is free or it’s paid for. For everyone including individuals and corporations.
You can’t have data be free for some people and be paid for for others it doesn’t work that way we don’t have the infrastructure to support this kind of thing.
For example Wikipedia can’t make its data available for AI training for a price and free for everyone else. You can just go to wikipedia.com and read all the data that you want. It’s available for free there’s no paywall there’s no subscriptions no account to make no password to put in no username to think of.
Either all data is free or it’s all paid for.
Many licences have different rules for redistribution, which I think is fair. The site is free to use but it’s not fair to copy all the data and make a competitive site.
Of course wikipedia could make such a license. I don’t think they have though.
How is the lack of infrastructure an argument for allowing something morally incorrect? We can take that argument to absurdum by saying there are more people with guns than there are cops - therefore killing must be morally correct.
I mean, sure, but the issue is that the rules aren’t being applied on the same level. The data in question isn’t free for you, it’s not free for me, but it’s free for OpenAI. They don’t face any legal consequences, whereas humans in the USA are prosecuted including an average fine per human of $266,000 and an average prison sentence of 25 months.
OpenAI has pirated, violated copyright, and distributed more copyright than an i divided human is reasonably capable of, and faces no consequences.
https://www.splaw.us/blog/2021/02/looking-into-statistics-on-copyright-violations/
https://www.patronus.ai/blog/introducing-copyright-catcher
My use of the term “human” is awkward, but US law considers corporations people, so i tried to differentiate.
I’m in favour of free and open data, but I’m also of the opinion that the rules should apply to everyone.
I tend to think that information should be free, generally, so I would probably be fine with “OpenAI the non-profit” taking copyrighted data under fair-use, but I don’t extend that thinking to “OpenAI the for-profit company”.
I love how die hard free market defenders turn into fuming protectionists the second their hegemony is threatened.
Tale as old as capitalism.
Yes get f*ed you creedy bastards.
the Chinese realised OpenAI forgot to open source their model and methodology so they just open sourced it for them 😂
It just gets better and better y’all.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/30/deepseek_database_left_open/
Security? We don’t need no security!
You get a free database, and you get free database, and you get a free database! EVERYBODY GETS A FREE DATABASE
Oprahbees.gif
No honor among thieves.
There’s plenty of honor in Deepseek releasing open source.
I knew something was wrong with this. I was wrong with what it was in the end but I knew something was up. But Noooo im just a China-Hater and USA-Fanboy -.-
It will go bad because LLM AI is bad; China has nothing to do with that part.
you don’t know what you are talking about and you are too stupid to figure out why here lol
git gud!
If these guys thought they could out-bootleg the fucking Chinese then I have an unlicensed t-shirt of Nicky Mouse with their name on it.
The thing is chinese did not just bootleg… they took what was out there and made it better.
Their shit is now likely objectively “better” (TBD tho we need sometime)… American parasites in shambles asking Daddy sam to intervene after they already block nvidia GPUs and shit.
Still got cucked and now crying about it to the world. Pathetic.
They also already rolled back Biden admin’s order for AI protections. So they don’t even have the benefit of those. There’s supposedly a Trump admin AI order now in place but it doesn’t have the same scope at all. So Altman and pals may just be SOL. There’s no regulatory body to tell except the courts and China literally doesn’t care about those.
Now I’m imagining “these guys” are named Nicky Mouse
Oh you want Nickey Mouse, sorry all we have is Mickey Moose.
DeepSeek’s actual trained model is immaterial—they could take it down tomorrow and never provide access again, and the damage to OpenAI’s business would still be done. DeepSeek’s model just a proof-of-concept—the point is that any organization with a few million dollars and some (hopefully less-problematical) training data can now make their own model competitive with OpenAI’s.
… assuming deepseek is telling the truth, something they have plenty of incentives to lie about
Imagine if a little bit of those so many millions that so many companies are willing to throw away to the shit ai bubble was actually directed to anything useful.
Deepseek can’t take down the model, it’s already been published and is mostly open source. Open source llms are the way, fuck closedAI
Right—by “take it down” I just meant take down online access to their running instance of it.
I suspect that most usage of the model is going to be companies and individuals running their own instance of it. They have some smaller distilled models based on Llama and Qwen that can run on consumer-grade hardware.
It’s called distilling the data, to turn the huge amount of data into a compact amount that can be used in another model.
The battle of the plagiarism machines has begun
