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Microsoft Probing If DeepSeek-Linked Group Improperly Obtained OpenAI Data
- JSR_FDED 2y agoDidn’t Stanford take the first version of Meta’s Llama, then use OpenAI (against its TOS) to create Alpaca?
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- tapoxi 2y agoOh I see, so training on copyrighted content is fine unless it's your AI model...
- maeil 2y agoDon't worry, OpenAI definitely didn't improperly obtain any of their training data nudge nudge wink wink.
- gonzo41 2y agoBefore anything else happens, the world will fall of it's axis from the irony of this. These are the sort of litigious death throws that the threatened orthodoxy throw out when they smell their own blood in the water. A Trillion dollar write down will do that to you.
- flashman 2y agoAI models and their outputs aren't copyrightable because they're not made with human creativity :)
- vinni2 2y agoBut their data is.
- chii 2y agoit's not copyright, but TOS violation that they're going for. Let's just hope that TOS violation is considered a contract breach, if it even is a valid contract, and not anything crime related. I don't want the state to expend any taxpayer dollars to fund civil offense prosecutions. The music industry has already managed to push their enforcement onto taxpayers via laws such as DMCA etc. Can't have this be done again, and with wider reach.
- mrbungie 2y agoLegalities don't make them any less hypocritical. Their strategy right now is to socialize the negative externalities (copyright does not protect anything from them) and capitalize the gains (ToS says you can't use their outputs). PS: I do understand your point. Using taxpayer money would be even worse.
- isomorphic 2y ago"We have no moat. But we are well-capitalized, so in classic early-mover monopolist fashion we'll try to pull the ladder up, then use funds to bri--er, lobby--the government into smacking down climbers."
- benterix 2y agoIf I understand their strategy, it's to limit the use of LLMs to American-based companies, by saying that it is dangerous (when used remotely) and illigal (when using remote models). So they strive to make it so that all American companies use American models whereas government agencies use their dedicated gov infra.
- true_religion 2y agoGovernment agencies would use dedicated infra anyways. Don’t many European governments insist on EU segregated cloud providers or open source software to avoid having critical infrastructure be under US control? And the US is an official ally, whereas China is not.
- joe_the_user 2y agoAnd I'd just add the quote from the non-paywalled fragment is "Microsoft’s security researchers in the fall observed individuals they believe may be linked to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI application programming interface, or API" IE, Indeed, "improperly" here is exactly the same "improperly" that a site owner applies to any bulk downloader. So... Scrape not lest ye be scraped, one law for me... etc
- vrighter 2y agoYou can't be "exfiltrating data" from an api that you pay for access to. That's just called "using what you paid for". Exfiltration is when you extract internal data that's private to the company.
- joe_the_user 2y agoIndeed, I think MS was trying to use the scariest term they could come up with. To belabor the point a bit, "we train, you exfiltrate" etc.
- lowlevel 2y agoYeah… Gonna file this under Who cares or Good for them….
- bodegajed 2y agoI'm not surprised. This is the expected behavior of a monopolist.
- kragen 2y agoAI model output is not copyrightable, though presumably that will change soon.
- quickslowdown 2y agoThese guys need to pick a damn lane, is it ok to steal data to train your chatbot or not? You can't have it both ways.
- blibble 2y agooh the irony also, I bet the Chinese are quaking in their boots at the thought of an investigation by Microsoft
- sdesol 2y agoBased on the article (see archive link by bushido), this might actually get very serious. Looks like politician are now involved and I'm sure Altman and Ellison are going to lean hard. --- David Sacks, President Donald Trump’s artificial intelligence czar, said Tuesday there’s “substantial evidence” that DeepSeek leaned on the output of OpenAI’s models to help develop its own technology. In an interview with Fox News, Sacks described a technique called distillation whereby one AI model uses the outputs of another for training purposes to develop similar capabilities. ---
- 8note 2y agoso far, OpenAi holds no copyright over those outputs, and even if they did, its fair use to train on them. T&C violations at the worst?
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- sdesol 2y agoWho knows with the Trump administration and their stacked Supreme court. I'm guessing what is going to be debated is not so much the data itself, but the means of obtaining the data. Basically there was breach of contract somewhere.
- blibble 2y agowhy would the Chinese pay any attention to a foreign court? especially on a matter of national interest a US court has no ability to enforce its judgement on Chinese actions in China
- ChuckMcM 2y agoOh cry me a river. Read the room Microsoft, you can't have it both ways.
- ToucanLoucan 2y agoAmerican corporations have it both ways all the time, and with a freshly elected pro-business at all costs admin I think they have a good shot. And not only is this pro-business, it’s anti-China. The republicans couldn’t ask for a better set of headlines than a Chinese firm outcompeting an American one unfairly or in some other underhanded way for yet more nationalistic chest-beating that will lead to yet more international humiliation. Fuck Altman and his scam company, fuck the entire tech industry for getting behind it so they don’t have to admit perpetual growth is fucking impossible, fuck the tech media for breaking its back bending over backwards to tell us fucking chatbots were the future and credulously printing every stupid hype piece, fuck this entire thing. I hope it burns to the foundations of Silicon Valley. Every one of these firms deserves every last lost dollar of market value and far more.
- spencerflem 2y agoBefore this gets flagged, just wanna let you know I agree with everything.
- juunpp 2y agoYou put it well. It should also be noted that the embargos and tariffs will only sabotage the US's own interests in the long term, as if the Chinese were not intelligent enough to make their own in-house technology. Wait until their own GPUs beat NV's; there are already startups at work [1]. The NSA used to put backdoors in US-made hardware, which it was then happy to distribute worldwide; now, somebody has decided that encouraging China to make their own will work well for US interests? I have no idea what this foreign policy is meant to accomplish. Even if you were the most patriot of US patriots, I have no idea why you'd support this policy. Even Huawei is striking back [2]. [1] https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-gpus-made-by-moore-threads-get-a-big-performance-boost-from-latest-driver https://www.tomshardware.com/news/chinese-gpus-made-by-moore... [2] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-01-28/huawei-harmonyos-next-review-new-phone-seeks-to-break-apple-google-dominance https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-01-28/huawei-ha...
- snickerbockers 2y agoOh, now it matters.
- dathinab 2y agothey probably want to create enough legal instability to prevent companies from using this model internally for their use cases
- tjpnz 2y agoWeren't they employing the same strategy against Linux not so long ago?
- aryonoco 2y agoOh yes; I'm old enough to remember the Halloween papers. Or Balmer frothing at the mouth calling Linux 'cancer'. I guess plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose
- BobbyTables2 2y agoI believe whilst they used it for hosting Microsoft.com websites too…
- edgineer 2y agolol, lmao even
- DarkmSparks 2y ago[flagged]
- siliconc0w 2y agoI bet they'll reverse course and get Sacks to push for some KYC regs to prevent frontier models from providing China additional training data.
- benreesman 2y agoThese guys must really be in some deep shit to pull a stunt like this. Isn’t the earnings call tomorrow? Have fun with that.
- dkrich 2y agoThis was my take as well. Nadella is looking increasingly desperate by the day to salvage this investment. First that Jevon paradox tweet after futures opened Sunday night now this clearly leaked story plus a tweet from Altman of them together lol. I actually recall him making a similar tweet last time futures tanked a few months ago though I don’t recall the context. Pretty clear that this thing is quickly getting away from them. Even if the data was stolen it doesn’t make any difference. You have no moat if scraped data is your moat. The moat was supposedly their ingenious engineers. I think a 180 is coming soon when Microsoft stops doubling down, takes their medicine and shifts their strategy to cut back on infrastructure spend. I think the risks are still enormous for the tech sector.
- raxxorraxor 2y agoThey did try to lock people in quickly with their copilot o365 extension by just increasing its price. I am not sure how this can be even legal to sell this as a price hike instead of a new product. Especially since the same product does still exist without copilot for cheaper. I think they weren't brazen enough to put this on business customers though, but I am not sure. Scummy in any way.
- tw1984 2y agoMicrosoft paid $14 billion so they have exclusive hosting accesses to those OpenAI models. Too bad that a free and open weight model appeared online that matches the performance of what they paid $14 billion for.
- arcmechanica 2y agoReminds me of when Yahoo blew $30m on a "ai" summarizer from a teenager that was just a front end to someone else's api https://www.wired.com/2013/03/yahoo-summly/ https://www.wired.com/2013/03/yahoo-summly/ clearly something was up when he turned down working for them to go to college instead
- tw1984 2y ago$14 billion generates almost half billion $ interests each year with federal deposit insurance, that alone is like 17-18x of $30m. :) those "decision makers" (aka human sized random number generators) in Microsoft have a lot of stories to prepare to convince their investors that they indeed made some smart moves.
- philipov 2y agoIt's okay, now they can use ChatGPT to write the stories for them!
- ashoeafoot 2y agobiggest tax write off based meme coin ever
- blastonico 2y agoThe problem is not the "improperly obtained", but the "they cannot have built it under a $6M budget, there should be something else going on..."
- maeil 2y agoLuckily they didn't build it for under $6M. Not even V3 let alone R1.
- kittikitti 2y agoSounds like Microsoft out litigates instead of out competes.
- neilv 2y agoI wonder whether bloomberg.com realized what a hilariously rage-baiting headline that is.
- bushido 2y agohttps://archive.ph/QouOV https://archive.ph/QouOV
- jazzyjackson 2y agoOutput of machines is not a creative expression and therefore not copyrightable. At worst the use of ChatGPT for generating training material is against their terms of service and so, is there any recourse besides banning some account used for this? (I actually don't know, has there ever been CFAA prosecution for acting outside of ToS ?)
- arcmechanica 2y agoprobably forced arbitration as is typical. bit them in the rear this time
- paxys 2y agoWhat are they going to do? Sue DeepSeek in a court in Hangzhou, China? Try and get the model weights taken down from the internet? Good luck with either one...
- waldrews 2y agoThis point got mocked when I raised it some time ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42561419 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42561419 Deepseek promptly fixed it so that their UI responds with 'Hi! I'm DeepSeek-V3, an AI assistant independently developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek Inc. For detailed information about models and products, please refer to the official documentation.' - but only if you ask that as the first question of the conversation. Bury the 'what model are you' question after a few unrelated questions, and it'll happily tell you it's ChatGPT. Is it possible that it's an actual distillation of weights, but into a radically different architecture? We don't have evidence of that, but that would be a great technical feat in itself. Is it trained on a large set of user requests and OpenAI replies? Yes. The question is, were these obtained by simply using the API contrary the user agreement at scale, or was there access to internal OpenAI datasets, or was there some kind of capture of conversations by a man-in-the-middle (which could be any of a number of AI access resellers)? The answer hinges on which _requests_ were in that training set, something that won't be easy to investigate - unless you're OpenAI itself, and can identify 'trap streets' in the archive of all conversations, cases where ChatGPT once gave an unusual response to an unusual request, and DeepSeek just happens to match it.
- whimsicalism 2y agoit’s not a radically different architecture. i think it’s probably just trained on API output, there are also third party broker markers for OAI API data
- hnburnsy 2y agoFrom December... Why DeepSeek’s new AI model thinks it’s ChatGPT... https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/27/why-deepseeks-new-ai-model-thinks-its-chatgpt/ https://techcrunch.com/2024/12/27/why-deepseeks-new-ai-model... >Posts on X — and TechCrunch’s own tests — show that DeepSeek V3 identifies itself as ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform. Asked to elaborate, DeepSeek V3 insists it is a version of OpenAI’s GPT-4 model released in 2023. >The delusions run deep. If you ask DeepSeek V3 a question about DeepSeek’s API, it’ll give you instructions on how to use OpenAI’s API. DeepSeek V3 even tells some of the same jokes as GPT-4 — down to the punchlines.
- muglug 2y ago> Microsoft’s security researchers in the fall observed individuals they believe may be linked to DeepSeek exfiltrating a large amount of data using the OpenAI application programming interface, or API, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the matter is confidential. > Such activity could violate OpenAI’s terms of service or could indicate the group acted to remove OpenAI’s restrictions on how much data they could obtain What do we think this means in practice? "Exfiltrating data" makes it sound like they were taking private chat logs, but I imagine that would be a much bigger deal. I'm assuming it's just using multiple free OpenAI accounts across a bunch of different IP addresses to generate a large training set.
- paxys 2y agoThe article is (I'm assuming knowingly) written to give the impression that this was the work of some elite state-sponsored hackers exploiting vulnerabilities in Microsoft/OpenAI's software. In reality they entered their credit card info and typed some commands, same as everyone else.
- mrbungie 2y agoDo they want to give off the vibe that their software is unreliable?. The same kind of software they want us to run 24/7 in enterprise/gov settings.
- whimsicalism 2y agoyes, it’s the last thing. this is how all reporting about China is and we just notice now because it’s our area of expertise
- rajup 2y agoJust big sounding words to make it sound like something nefarious is happening. Nothing of that sort actually happened, just OpenAI trying to save face.
- juunpp 2y agoWell, I can't wait for the day when Microsoft just disappears. All their life trying to stifle innovation and competition, and here we are again, where this time they have essentially been scammed by OpenAI thinking that they could pull off their anti-competitive practices once more with exclusive access to their models, only to then learn that they've lost and resorting to litigating their sorry ass out of the situation, all the while the US government is living a crypto wars dejavu trying to manufacture as much propaganda as possible to make us believe China is the new enemy we should be worried about this time. Yep, nope, thanks. Keep those papers coming, bois. Make those models small enough that they can run locally so we don't depend on an online feudal lord.
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- glouwbug 2y agoCouldn't you just... train off chatgpt's output?
- neonnomad 2y agoWhen looking at this I became suspicious because Deepseek has/had dns records referencing openai and co-pilot. Then I got their chat to tell me what their model is based off of and it said ChatGPT. Hope my own bluesky account is okay for screenshots: https://bsky.app/profile/rosshosman.bsky.social/post/3lgu4c5do622e https://bsky.app/profile/rosshosman.bsky.social/post/3lgu4c5...
- dustyharddrive 2y agoMaybe they've used those names to test their OpenAI-compatible API (https://api-docs.deepseek.com https://api-docs.deepseek.com)?
- sunaookami 2y ago>Then I got their chat to tell me what their model is based off of and it said ChatGPT The same is true for Llama, Claude, etc. The internet is polluted with GPT stuff so of course LLM's will hallucinate that part. LLM's do not know about themselves.
- neonnomad 2y agoWhy do they have dns records around copilot and openai then?
- sunaookami 2y agoThis commenter was faster: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42861914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42861914
- Mehuleo 2y agoI think you're misunderstanding the answer here. By asking that you're assuming that the model has a self-awareness but most models don't. Think of it as a common question asked on internet. They just have a training data and answers are from that. And Chat GPT is mostly talked about on the internet, so you get that answer. You can replicate this behavior with most open source model.
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- _Algernon_ 2y agoThe world's smallest violin playing for OpenAI... No sympathy from me. If you use copyrighted material to build your empire, you don't get to turn around and complain when somebody else does the same (even if they are chinese).
- jaikant 2y agoThis sounds funny.
- vrighter 2y agoso it's ok if they ignore robots.txt and just vacuum up every scrap of data they can, but not when someone else does it to them, iiuc
- vinni2 2y agowhat legal actions OpenAI can take if this is proven to be true? can DeepSeek be banned in US? I am also curious if they used any probing or watermarking of their models to detect this.
- vrighter 2y agoGood luck enforcing that. If it were a paid product you might be able to ban selling it. But the weights are freely available on the internet. There is no practical way to ban it, short of scanning every storage device in the country to check if it's there, which is not really possible.
- 827a 2y agoHey team, let's wait and see if this post gets flagged off the frontpage of HackerNews like every other anti-DeepSeek post in the past 72 hours.
- arcmechanica 2y agoWhich is silly, because I 100% expected the Chinese to figure out how to use fewer resources to get the same work done. I mean that is what the blocking of chips and tech was going to do. It is evolution.
- maeil 2y agoWhat are you talking about? Are you aware that the DeepSeek API has gone down for over a day and DeepSeek claims it's due to a large-scale cyberattack? [1] HN post about it got 20 points and 5 comments, completely ignored.[2] This one you're commenting on is frontpage. If HN was so valiantly pro-DeepSeek, their claim would deserve large attention. [1] status.deepseek.com [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849570 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42849570
- not_your_vase 2y agoAnd, do what? China is famous for their deeply rooted respect for the (assumed and real) rights of foreign companies, right?
- NitpickLawyer 2y agoThere's a reason the top labs aren't releasing their frontier models anymore, and instead keep them in-house and use them to fine-tune smaller models. Because it works! It's the same reason o1 doesn't give you the "thinking" steps. Distillation works. It gets you ~80% of the way, as evidenced by the qwen/llama distillations of R1. The "walls" aren't what they appear to be.
- maeil 2y agoGemini 2.0-flash-thinking shows reasoning steps, it's only OpenAI who don't. Anthropic gives their system prompts. Looks to be SamA wanting to keep his company shrouded in mystery to appear stronger than it is.
- picafrost 2y agoIf they really believe billions, trillions, the whole of human future is on the line, it’s going to get messy. American capitalists have excelled at ruthless competition by the sword (which is frequently the legal pen) since the days of pelts, gold, oil, etc.
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- chvid 2y agoIsn’t OpenAI blocking China? https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/09/chinese-developers-openai-blocks-access-in-china-artificial-intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/jul/09/chines... Chinese developers scramble as OpenAI blocks access in China In other words how could Deepseek, a Chinese company, have entered terms of service with OpenAI?
- maeil 2y agoIME OpenAI doesn't block Hong Kong for one, while Anthropic does. As an aside, this made Cloudflare's AI Gateway an unusable product, as they hilariously put a node in HK so you never know when your Anthropic request is randomly going to fail defeating the whole purpose behind the product.
- sdesol 2y agoThe article says linked. It could be someone's grandma living outside of China, or it could be a company outside of China with links to DeepSeek.
- courseofaction 2y agoWho gives a hoot. OpenAI lies and steals and grifts and the sooner the responsibility for or control of any important tech is taken away from them the better.
- chvid 2y agoIf I was OpenAI, I would start worrying about my public image. The reason Microsoft could get away with being horrible for many years was that they had moat.
- andrewstuart 2y agoIrony in the deepest sense of the word.
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- drysine 2y ago"As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP" So now it is a problem? )
- hokkos 2y agoThe administration will probably block deepseek access to the app stores like they are doing for tiktok for daring to be competitive with us companies.
- Kye 2y agoIt's all "you shouldn't have posted it online!" until someone does it to them, then it's all "what ever happened to honor among thieves?"
- Palmik 2y agoWhat's the problem? At most this might be a ToS violation, but it also seems easy to avoid that (if you care at all). DeepSeek does not even have to be a customer of OpenAI and thus not subject to their ToS. Company A pays OpenAI for their API. They use the API to generate or augment a lot of data. They own the data. They post the data on the open Internet. Company B has the habit of scraping various pages on the Internet to train its large language models, which includes the data posted by Company A. [1] OpenAI is undoubtedly breaking many terms of service and licenses when it uses most of the open Internet to train its models. Not to mention potential copyright violations (which do not apply to AI outputs). [1]: This is not hypothetical BTW. In the early days of LLMs, lots of large labs accidentally and not so accidentally trained on the now famous ShareGPT dataset (outputs from ChatGPT shared on the ShareGPT website).