8 ms·
There is a third possibility I haven't seen discussed yet: That DeepSeek, illegally, got their hands on an OpenAI model via a breach of OpenAI's systems. Its ea
by 827a 2y ago
There is a third possibility I haven't seen discussed yet: That DeepSeek, illegally, got their hands on an OpenAI model via a breach of OpenAI's systems. Its easy to laugh at OpenAI and say "you reap what you sow", I'm 100% in that camp, but given the lengths other Chinese entities have gone to when it comes to replicating Western technology; we should not discount this.
That being said, breaching OAI's systems, re-training a better model on top of their closed source model, then open sourcing it: That's more Robinhood than Villain I'd say.
- alecco 2y agoThat would require stealing the model weights and the code as OpenAI has been hiding what they are doing. Running models properly is still quite artistic. Meanwhile, they have access to Meta models and Qwen. And Meta models are very easy to run and there's plenty of published work on them. Occam's Razor.
- ardit33 2y agoHow hard it is, if you have someone inside with the access of the code? If you have 100s of people with full access, not hard to have someone that is willing to sell it or do some industrial espionage...
- johnnyanmac 2y agoLots of if's here. They need specific US employee contacts at a company thars quickly growing and one of those needs to be willing to breach their contracts to share it. That contact also needs to trust that Deepseek can properly utilize such code and completely undercut their own work. Lot of hoops when there's simply other models to utilize publicly
- foobarian 2y agoHow big are the weights for the full model? If it's on the scale of a large operating system image then it might be easy to sneak, but if it's an entire data lake, not so much.
- dylan604 2y agodevil's advocate says that we know that foreign (hell even national) intelligence attempt to infiltrate agents by having them become employees at any company they are interested. So the idea isn't just pulled from thin air as a concept. I do agree that it is a big if with no corroborating evidence for the specific claim.
- iforgot22 2y agoI doubt that many people have full access to OpenAI's code. Their team is pretty small.
- seanhunter 2y agoThe reason you’re not seeing that being discussed is it’s totally unsupported by any evidence that’s in the public domain. Unless you have some actual evidence of such a breach, you may as well introduce the possibility that DeepSeek was reverse engineered from data found at an alien crash site.
- ryanisnan 2y ago[flagged]
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago> foreign nation-state backed organization I'm European, are you talking about Microsoft, Google, or OpenAI?
- doctaj 2y agoThey’re referring to an organization (like a hacking group) backed by a country (like china, North Korea).
- freehorse 2y agoSo, which of them 3?
- dylan604 2y agoYou're missing the point that for a much larger portion of the world, all "tech" is a foreign entity to them
- mrguyorama 2y agoUntil recently treating the US and China on the same geopolitical level for allied countries would have been insanely uncharitable and impossible to do honestly and in good faith. But now we have a bully in the whitehouse who seems to want to literally steal neighboring land, or is throwing shit everywhere to distract from the looting and oligarchy being formed. So I suddenly have more empathy for that position.
- hnlmorg 2y ago[flagged]
- mcmcmc 2y agoNobody is accusing them, just stating it’s a possibility, which would also be true if they were an American or European company. Corporate espionage is just more common in China.
- nostradumbasp 2y agoNo reason why you were downvoted. This is completely valid.
- pests 2y agoThere’s no evidence. We can talk about hypotheticals all we want, but who wants to do that?
- nostradumbasp 2y agoThere's no evidence for almost any of this, and even when there is, we won't see it. Just like 95% of posts on here.
- Retric 2y agoBelief that the CCP is behaving poorly isn’t racial prejudice, it’s a factual statement backed by a mountain of evidence across many areas including an ongoing genocide. Extending that to a new bad behavior we don’t have evidence for is pure speculation, but it need not be based on race.
- nostradumbasp 2y agoYea but I think the OPs point is something along the following lines. Not everything you buy from China, or every person you interact with from China is part of a clandestine CCP operation. People buy stuff everyday from Alibaba and its not a CCP scheme to sell portable fans, or phone chargers. A big chunk of the factories over there are US funded after all... Just like how it's not a CCP scheme to write a scientific paper, or create a ML model. Similarly, I see no evidence (yet) that DeepSeek is a CCP operated company anymore than saying any given AI start up in the US is a three letter agencies direct handiwork or a US political party directive. The US has also supported genocides and a bunch of crazy stuff, but that doesn't mean any company in YC is part of a US government plot. I know of people who immigrated to China, I know people who immigrated from China, I went to school with people who were on visas from China. Maybe some of them were CCP assets or something, but mostly they appeared to me to be people who were doing what they wanted for themselves. If you believe both sides are up to no-goodery thats in the face of the OPs statement. If you think it's just one, and the enemy is in complete control of all of its people doing all of their commerce then I think the OP may have a point.
- exe34 2y agoI don't think you need to steal a model - you need training samples generated from the original, which you can get simply by buying access to perform API calls. This is similar to TinyStories (https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759 https://arxiv.org/abs/2305.07759), except here they're training something even better than the original model for a fraction of the price.
- nostradumbasp 2y agoI really doubt it. If that's the case the US GOV is in serious shit. They have a contract with OpenAI to chuck all their secret data in there... In all likelihood they just distilled. It's a start up company that is publishing all of their actual advances in the open, with proof. I think a lot of people run to "espionage" super fast, when reality is, the US probably sucks at what we call AI. Don't read that wrong, they are a world leader obviously. However, there is a ton of stuff they have yet to figure out. Cheapening a series of fact checkable innovations because of the country of origin when so far all that they have showed are signs of good faith is paranoid at best and propaganda to support the billionaire tech lords saving face for their own arrogance at worst.
- sanitycheck 2y agoIf the US government is "chucking all their secret data" into OpenAI servers/models, frankly they deserve everything they get for that level of stupidity.
- nostradumbasp 2y agohttps://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-chatgpt-gov/ https://openai.com/global-affairs/introducing-chatgpt-gov/ And don't forget the billions in partnerships...
- ryandrake 2y agoChatGPT, please complete a memo that starts with: "Our 5 year plan for military deployments in southeast Asia are..."
- nostradumbasp 2y agoSounds hilarious but... https://techstory.in/trump-is-accused-of-using-ai-to-compose-garbled-executive-orders-controversy-grows/ https://techstory.in/trump-is-accused-of-using-ai-to-compose...
- compootr 2y ago
- ls_stats 2y ago[flagged]
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y agoI discount this because OpenAI is pumping the whole internet for money, and Zuckerberg torrented LibGen for its AI. We cannot blame the Chinese anymore. They went through the crappy "Made in China" phase in the 80s/90s, but they mastered the art of improving stuff instead of mere cloning, and it makes the big companies angry which is a nice bonus. IMHO the whole world is becoming crazy for a lot of reasons, and pissing off billionaires makes me laugh.
- tehjoker 2y agoBasically, without some kind of shred of evidence, this is completely chauvinist to make this accusation.
- YetAnotherNick 2y agoDeepseek v2 and v2.5 was still very good but not par with frontier models. How would you explain that?
- WheatMillington 2y agoDo you have ANY reason to believe this might be true, or is this 100% pure speculation based on absolutely nothing?
- kmeisthax 2y agoI'd be perfectly fine with China stealing all "our" shit if they just shared it. The word "our" does a lot of heavy lifting in politics[0]. America is not a commune, it's a country club, one which we used to own but have been bought out of, and whose new owners view us as moochers but can't actually kick us out (yet). It is in competition with another, worse country club that purports to be a commune. We owe neither country club our loyalty, so when one bloodies the other's nose, I smile. [0] Some languages have a notion of an "exclusive we". If English had such a concept, this would be an exclusive our.
- kridsdale1 2y agoThis comment made me realize we don’t have a pronoun for n-our or x-nour
- notatoad 2y agoGiven the openness of their model, that should be pretty easy to detect. If it were even a small possibility, wouldn’t openAI be talking about it very very loudly?
- mvdtnz 2y agoWe shouldn't discount a thing for which there is absolutely zero evidence? Sorry that's not how it works.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- sho_hn 2y agoCan you explain at a technical level how you view this as necessary for the observed result?
- matt-p 2y agoI don't think we should discount it as such, but given there's no evidence for it, yet plenty of evidence that they trained this themselves surely we can't seriously entertain it?
- jacobgorm 2y agoI think people overestimate the amount of secret sauce needed to train these models. The reason AI has come this far since AlexNet is that most of the foundational techniques are easy to share and implement, and that companies have been surprisingly willing to share their tricks openly, at least until OpenAI decide to become evil hoarders.