OpenAI, the author of ChatGPT, stated on Wednesday that Chinese companies are aggressively working to copy its advanced AI models after startup DeepSeek caused fear on Wall Street this week.
OpenAI’s comment came after Chinese startup DeepSeek caused a stir on Wall Street this week with its strong new chatbot, produced at a fraction of the cost of its US competitors. Deepseek’s success has provoked charges that it has reverse engineered the capabilities of cutting-edge US technology, such as the AI that powers ChatGPT.
OpenAI claimed that competitors were employing a method known as distillation, in which engineers constructing smaller models learn from larger ones by mimicking their behaviour and decision-making patterns, comparable to a student learning from a teacher.
“We know (China)-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI companies,” an OpenAI spokeswoman told AFP, emphasising US-China tensions over AI intellectual property protection.
We “believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the US government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take US technology.”
David Sacks, the new AI Czar for the Trump administration, told Fox News that there was “substantial evidence that what DeepSeek did here is they distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI’s models.” OpenAI stated that the process violated its terms of service and will seek to detect and prevent such attempts.
The company, run by Sam Altman, is facing several intellectual property violations claims around the world, notably for using copyrighted information to train its generative artificial intelligence models.
