OpenAI now wants to make DeepSeek look like the villain
CNN
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels. ICYMI: DeepSeek is a Chinese AI lab with a model that’s similar to ChatGPT, and people are freaking out over it because of its engineers’ claims about how they built it — cheaply, using a small fraction of the computing power used by US labs like OpenAI. Big picture: DeepSeek has forced tech bros and their investors to question the industry’s core assumption that they need gajillions more dollars to effectively secure enough energy to power their AI advancements. Now, perhaps not unexpectedly, American tech leaders are trying to shift the narrative to make DeepSeek look like the villain. (And you gotta suspect none of these guys — they’re mostly guys — paid attention in English class because they appear fully unaware of the excruciating irony — some might say hypocrisy — baked into their accusations.) On Tuesday, Bloomberg and the Financial Times reported that OpenAI and Microsoft, its biggest investor, are looking into evidence that DeepSeek used OpenAI’s intellectual property to build its competitor, violating its terms of service. An OpenAI spokesperson confirmed to CNN on Wednesday that the company is “aware of and reviewing indications that DeepSeek may have inappropriately distilled our models, and will share information as we know more.” “Distilling” isn’t exactly stealing, but it is a kind of copycat maneuver used by developers to train smaller AI models on the performance of larger, more sophisticated ones. (More on that in a moment.) So, to recap: OpenAI, a startup that’s built on a foundation of data it scraped from the internet without permission, is pointing the finger at another startup allegedly doing… more or less the same thing.
The DeepSeek drama may have been briefly eclipsed by, you know, everything in Washington (which, if you can believe it, got even crazier Wednesday). But rest assured that over in Silicon Valley, there has been nonstop, Olympic-level pearl-clutching over this Chinese upstart that managed to singlehandedly wipe out hundreds of billions of dollars in market cap in just a few hours and put America’s mighty tech titans on their heels.
At her first White House briefing, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt made an unusual claim about inflation that has stung American shoppers for years: Leavitt said egg prices have continued to surge because “the Biden administration and the department of agriculture directed the mass killing of more than 100 million chickens, which has led to a lack of chicken supply in this country, therefore lack of egg supply, which is leading to the shortage.”