> “It’s also extremely hard to rally a big talented research team to charge a new hill in the fog together,” he added. “This is the key to driving progress forward.”
Well I think DeepSeek releasing it open source and on an MIT license will rally the big talent. The open sourcing of a new technology has always driven progress in the past.
The last paragraph too is where OpenAi seems to be focusing their efforts..
> we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models ..
> ... 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.
So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok was now that a precedent has been set ?
Actually the "our IP" argument is ridiculous. What they are doing is stealing data from all over the web, without people's consent for that data to be used in training ML models. If anything, then "Open"AI should be sued and forced to publish their whole product. The people should demand knowing exactly what is going on with their data.
Also still an unresolved issue is how they will ever comply with a deletion request, should any model output personal data of someone. They are heavily in a gray area, with regards to what should be allowed. If anything, they should really shut up now.
They can still have IP while using copyrighted training materials - the actual model source code.
But DeepSeek didn't use that presumably (since it's secret). They definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.
> Only works with human authors can receive copyrights, U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell said[1]
IANAL but it seems to me that OpenAI wouldn’t be able to claim their outputs are IP since they are AI-generated.
It may be against their TOS, meaning OpenAI could refuse to provide service to DeepSeek in the future, but they can’t really sue them.
Did OpenAI ask all of the authors of the works they ingested to train their model for permission? Is OpenAI the biggest copyrighted works launderer in existence?
I don't think OpenAI should be able to make any claims of IP for the AI generated outputs, since they based that on other work, partially copyrighted work, which they hide. They simply throw algorithms at data that is not their data to begin with.
If I steal something, keep the exact thing I stole hidden, and sell a product, that I could only have made, based on the stolen thing, how can I expect that to be even legal, let alone untouchable IP?
I think way too many people have seen too many dollar signs in front of their eyes. The whole thing is outrageous. If they were transparently proving, that they are using open data sets, adhering to licenses, then they would get to claim IP.
> [OpenAI] definitely can't argue that using copyrighted material for training is fine, but using output from other commercial models isn't. That's too inconsistent.
Well, they can argue that, if they're fine with being hypocrites.
If there's any litigation, a counterclaim would be interesting. But DeepSeek would need to partner with parties that have been damaged by OpenAI's scraping.
I'm getting popcorn ready for the trial where an apparatus of the Chinese Communist Party files a counterclaim in an American Court together with the common people - millions of John Does - as litigants against an organization that has aggressively and in many cases of oppressively scraped their websites (DDoS)
I would definitely pay for seeing that movie! Especially if it led to greedy tech giants becoming very careful about what data they gather and ingest for training of ML models.
They've started already, I've seen posts on LinkedIn implying or outright stating that DeepSeek is a national security risk (IMHO, LinkedIn being the social media outlet most corporate-sycophantic). I went ahead and just picked this one at random from my feed.
At least this guy can differentiate between running your own model and using the web/mobile app where DeepSeek process your data. I've watched a TV show yesterday (I think it was France24) where the "experts" can't really tell the difference or are not aware of it. Shut down the TV and went to sleep.
All you would do by banning it is killing US progress in AI. The rest of the world is still going to be able to use DS. You're just giving the rest of the world a leg up.
TikTok is a consumption tool, DS is a productive one. They aren't the same.
It’s simply because banning removes a market force in the US that’d drive technological advancement.
This is already evident with CNSA/NASA, Huawei/Android, TikTok/Western social media. The Western tech gets mothballed because we stick our heads in the sand and pretend we are undisputed leaders of the world in tech, whereas it is slowly becoming disputable.
The US won't ban DeepSeek from US, but more likely we will ban DeepSeek (and other Chinese companies) from accessing US frontier models.
> Western tech gets mothballed because we stick our heads in the sand and pretend we are undisputed leaders of the world in tech, whereas it is slowly becoming disputable.
I am hearing Chinese tech is now the best and they achieved it with banning things left and right.
The fact it is out and improving day by day. Unsloth.ai is on a roll with their advancements. If DeepSeek is banned hundreds more will popup and change the data ever so slightly to skirt the ban. Pandora's box exploded on this one.
Already happening within tech company policy. Mostly as a security concern. Local or controlled hosting of the model is okay in theory based on this concern, but it taints everything regarding deepseek in effect.
> So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok was now that a precedent has been set ?
Can't really ban what can be downloaded for free and hosted by anyone. There are many providers hosting the ~700B parameter version that aren't CCP aligned.
I'm old enough to remember when the US government did something very similar. For years (decades?), we banned any implementation of public-key cryptography under the guise of the technology being akin to munitions.
People made shirts with printouts of the code to RSA under the heading "this shirt is a munition." Apparently such shirts are still for sale, even though they are not classified as munitions anymore.
I am not that old, but I did a deep dive on this in the past because it was just so extremely fascinating, especially reading the archives of Cypherpunk. There is a very solid, if rather bendy, line connecting all that to "crypto culture" today.
Were these implementations already easily open source accessible at the time, with tens of thousands of people already actively using them on their computers? No, right? Doesn't seem feasible this time around.
I don’t think an import ban would be any harder to enforce than an export ban. In fact if anything, I’d expect an import ban to be easier.
Though I’m not suggesting an import ban on DeepSeek would be effective either. Just that the US does have precedence pulling these kinds of stunts.
You can also look at the 90s subculture for passing DeCSS code (a tool for breaking DVD encryption) to see another example of how people wilfully skirted these kinds of stupid legal limitations.
So if you were to ask me if a ban on DeepSeek would work, the answer is clearly “no”. But that doesn’t mean it’s not going to happen. And if it does, the only people hurt are legitimate US businesses who might get a benefit from DeepSeek but have to follow the law. Those of us outside of America will be completely unaffected. Just like we were when US tried to limit the distribution of GPG.
Napster was one of thousands, if not 10s of thousands of similar services for music download.
And this analogy isn't particularly good. Napster was the server, not the product. Whether you got XYZ from Napster or wherever else doesn't matter, because its the product that you are after, not the way to get the product.
> So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok
The UAE (where I live, happily, and by choice), which desperately wants to be the center of the world in AI and is spending vast time and treasure to make it happen (they've even got their own excellent, government-funded foundation model), would _love_ this. Any attempt to ban DeepSeek in the US would be the most gigantic self-own. Combine that with no income tax, a fantastic standard of living, and a willingness to very easily give out visas to smart people from anywhere in the world, and I have to imagine it is one of several countries desperate for the US to do something so utterly stupid.
The fact that they are still called "Open"AI adds such a delicious irony to this whole thing. I could not imagine a company I had less sympathy for in this situation.
500 billion for a few US companies yet the Chinese will probably still be better for way less money. This might turn out to be a historical mistake of the new administration.
And what are they going to sell? The weights and the model architecture are already open source. I doubt the datasets of DeepSeek are better than OpenAI's
plus, if the US were to decide to ban DeepSeek (the company) wouldn't non-chinese companies be able to pick up the models and run them at a relatively low expense?
Except access to the app didn't have to stop. TikTok chose to manipulate users and Trump by going beyond the law and kissing Trump's rear. It was only US companies that couldn't host the app (eg Google and Apple). Users in the US could have still accessed the app, and even side-loaded it on Android, but TikTok purposely blocked them and pretended it was the ban. They were able to do it because they know the exact location of every TikTok user whether you use a VPN or not.
Source:
> If not sold within a year, the law would make it illegal for web-hosting services to support TikTok, and it would force Google and Apple to remove TikTok from app stores — rendering the app unusable with time.
They don't know your exact location, but they would flag your account/device depending on your App Store localization and IP. I tested this, it doesn't work from outside of the US with a US IP, doesn't work outside of the US with the app downloaded on a phone set to US with a non-US IP, but instead requires a phone localized to download the app from outside the US, being outside the US, with an account that hasn't registered as in the US.
So no, it doesn't use your exact location, it just uses the censorship mechanisms that Apple and Google gracefully provide.
Well I think DeepSeek releasing it open source and on an MIT license will rally the big talent. The open sourcing of a new technology has always driven progress in the past.
The last paragraph too is where OpenAi seems to be focusing their efforts..
> we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models ..
> ... 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.
So they'll go for getting DeepSeek banned like TikTok was now that a precedent has been set ?