OpenAI's future investments -- billions -- were just threatened to be undercut by several orders of magnitude by a competitor. It's in their best interests to cast doubt on that competitor's achievements. If they can do so by implying that OpenAI are in fact the source of most of the DeepSeek's performance then all the better.
It doesn't matter whether there's a compelling legal argument around copyright, or even if it's true that they actually copied. It just needs to be plausible enough that OpenAI can make a reasonable case for continuing investment at the levels it's historically attained.
And plausibility is something they've handily achieved with this announcement -- the sentiment on HN at least is that it is indeed plausible that DeepSeek trained on OpenAI. Which means there's now doubt that a DeepSeek-level model could be trained without making use of OpenAI's substantial levels of investment. Which is the only thing that OpenAI should be caring about.
> It's in their best interests to cast doubt on that competitor's achievements.
it is, but the 2nd order logic says that if they are trying to cast doubt, it means they've got nothing better to offer and casting doubt is the only step they have.
if i was an investor in openAI, this should be very scary as it simply means I've overvalued it.
>it is, but the 2nd order logic says that if they are trying to cast doubt, it means they've got nothing better to offer and casting doubt is the only step they have.
this implies that when casting doubt the doubt is always false, if the doubt here is true, then it is a good offer.
Something is true whether or not you doubt it, you then confirm your doubt as true or prove it false.
Commonly the phrase sowing doubt is used to say an argument someone has made is false, but that was evidently not what the parent poster meant, although it was what the comment I replied to probably interpreted it as.
on edit: I believe what the parent poster meant is that whether or not OpenAI/Altman believes the doubts expressed, they are pretty much constrained to cast some doubt as they do whatever else they are planning to deal with the situation. From outside we can't know if they believe it or not.
DeepSeek is a card trick. They came up with a clever way to do multi-headed attention, the rest is fluff. Janus-Pro-7B is a joke. It would have mattered a year ago but also just a poor imitation of what's already on the market. Especially when they've obfuscated that they're using a discrete encoder to downsample image generation.
> it is, but the 2nd order logic says that if they are trying to cast doubt, it means they've got nothing better to offer and casting doubt is the only step they have.
I don't think that this is a working argument, because all their steps I can imagine are not mutually exclusive.
Even if that narrative is true, they were still undercut by DeepSeek. Maybe DeepSeek couldn't have succeeded without o1, but then it should have been even easier for OpenAI to do what DeepSeek did, since they have better access to o1.
This argument would excuse many kinds of intellectual property theft. "The person whose work I stole didn't deserve to have it protected, because I took their first draft and made a better second draft. Why didn't they just skip right to the second draft, like me?"
I’d take this argument more seriously if there weren’t billboards advocating hiring AI employees instead of human employees.
Sure, Open AI invested billions banking on the livelihood of every day people being replaced, or as Sam says, “A renegotiation of the social contract”
so as an engineer that is being targeted by meta and sales force under the “not hiring engineers plan” all o have to say to Open AI is “welcome to the social contract renegotiation table”
"It doesn't matter whether there's a compelling legal argument around copyright, or even if it's true they actually copied."
Indeed, when the alleged infringer is outside US jurisdiction and not violating any local laws in the country where it's domiciled.
The fact that Microsoft cannot even get this app removed from "app stores" tells us all we need to know.
It will be OpenAI and others who will be copying DeepSeek.
Some of us would _love_ to see Microsoft try to assert copyright over a LLM. The question might not be decided in their favour, putting a spectre over all their investment. It is not a risk worth taking.
>It just needs to be plausible enough that OpenAI can make a reasonable case for continuing investment at the levels it's historically attained
>there's now doubt that a DeepSeek-level model could be trained without making use of OpenAI's substantial levels of investment.
But, this still seems to be a problem for OpenAI. Who wants to invest "substantially" in a company whose output can be used by competitors to build an equal or better offering for orders of magnitude less?
Seems they'd need to make that copyright stick. But, that's a very tall and ironic order, given how OpenAI obtained its data in the first place.
There's a scenario where this development is catastrophic for OpenAI's business model.
>There's a scenario where this development is catastrophic for OpenAI's business model.
Is there a scenario where it isn’t?
Either (1) a competitor is able to do it better without their work or (2) a competitor is able to use their output and develop a better product.
Either way, given the costs, how do you justify investing in OpenAI if the competitor is going to eat their lunch and you’ll never get a return on your investment?
The scenario to which I was alluding assumed the latter (2) and, further, that OpenAI was unable to prevent that—either technically or legally (i.e. via IP protection).
More specifically, on the legal side I don't see how they can protect their output without stepping on their own argument for ingesting everyone else's. And, if that were to indeed prove impossible, then that would be the catastrophic scenario.
On your point (1), I don't think that's necessarily catastrophic. That's just good old-fashioned competition, and OpenAI would have to simply best them on R&D.
OpenAI is going out of their way to demonstrate that they will willingly spend the money of their investors to the tune of 100s of billions of dollars, only to then enable 100s of derivative competitors that can be launched at a fraction of the cost.
Basically, in a round about way, OpenAi is going back to their roots and more - they're something between a charity and Robin Hood, stealing the money of rich investors and giving it to poor and aspirational AI competitors.
Homogeneous systems kill innovation, with that in mind, I guess it’s a good thing DeepSeek disregards licenses? Seems like sledding down an icy slope, slippery. and they suck.
OpenAI's future investments -- billions -- were just threatened to be undercut by several orders of magnitude by a competitor. It's in their best interests to cast doubt on that competitor's achievements. If they can do so by implying that OpenAI are in fact the source of most of the DeepSeek's performance then all the better.
It doesn't matter whether there's a compelling legal argument around copyright, or even if it's true that they actually copied. It just needs to be plausible enough that OpenAI can make a reasonable case for continuing investment at the levels it's historically attained.
And plausibility is something they've handily achieved with this announcement -- the sentiment on HN at least is that it is indeed plausible that DeepSeek trained on OpenAI. Which means there's now doubt that a DeepSeek-level model could be trained without making use of OpenAI's substantial levels of investment. Which is the only thing that OpenAI should be caring about.