You're right that the first claim is silly, but the second claim is pretty silly too — they're not claiming industrial espionage, they're claiming a breach in T

You're right that the first claim is silly, but the second claim is pretty silly too — they're not claiming industrial espionage, they're claiming a breach in ToS. The outputs of the o1 thinking process aren't user-visible, and never leave OpenAI's datacenters. Unless DeepSeek actually had a mole that stole their o1 outputs, there's nothing useful DeepSeek could've distilled to get to R1's thought processes. And if DeepSeek had a mole, why would they bother running a massive job internally to steal the data generated? It would be way easier for the mole to just leak the RL training process, and DeepSeek could quietly copy it rather than bothering with exfiltrating massive datasets to distill. The training process is most likely like, on the order of a hundred lines of Python or so, and you don't even need the file: you just need someone to describe it to you. Much simpler than snatching hundreds of gigabytes of training data off of internal servers... Plus, the RL process described in DeepSeek's paper has already been replicated by a PhD student at Berkeley: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1884678601704169965 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1884678601704169965 So, it seems pretty unlikely they simply distilled R1 and lied about it, or else how does their RL training algo actually... work? This is mainly cope from OpenAI that their supposedly super duper advanced models got caught by China within a few months of release, for way cheaper than it cost OpenAI to train.