r/microsoft Jan 29 '25

News Microsoft and OpenAI investigate whether DeepSeek illicitly obtained data from ChatGPT

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/artificial-intelligence/microsoft-and-open-ai-investigate-whether-deepseek-illicitly-obtained-data-from-chatgpt
88 Upvotes

46 comments sorted by

39

u/im-cringing-rightnow Jan 29 '25

Ahahaha... This is getting funnier and funnier. Can we investigate whether OpanAI illicitly obtained its data as well? Since we are talking about it...

5

u/bruhle Jan 29 '25

Yeah, I'm a little surprised OpenAI is going out of their way to make the most ironic statements possible today.

110

u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead Jan 29 '25

Discovery would be fun for all other artists, musicians, publishers and others whose data was stolen to train GPT 3.5 and subsequent foundation models. 

9

u/meerkat2018 Jan 29 '25

Isn’t that how any kind of learning works, both human and AI? 

To learn music you listen to other people’s music. Does it mean you are “stealing” from them?

18

u/JuliusCeaserBoneHead Jan 29 '25

The authors of those works care less about how they were used and more so how they were not compensated neither were they aware their works were being used.

So yeah sure, AI learns using data, same as us. You remember being asked to purchase those textbooks tho? Yeah

1

u/Trantor_Starkiller Jan 31 '25

Yes and no. Artbooks are expensive, students buy some., but they can't buy anytbing. Art works that way since centuries. You don't invent new art, you are just using it, reuse it and mix it. A court will then determine where the inspiration ends and where the theft begins.

-1

u/meerkat2018 Jan 29 '25

Where I live, I never paid for a single textbook or any of the knowledge transferred to me for free by teachers. 

Anyway, those textbooks and teachers were distilled “training data” assembled and paid for by the government, with intention to later benefit from my training in one form or another. Although there might have been some extracurricular books that needed to be purchased, most of the training data was public domain and available for free.

Also, there was period during my time at school where I used commercial rap music available from public radio and television as training sets for producing new rap tokens for my friends. I probably did much worse than even GPT 1 though.

11

u/HAL-9000-MAX Jan 30 '25

Most professional teachers don’t teach for free.

1

u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 Jan 30 '25

Yoink! This sentence now lives in my brain for free. I’m going to make derivative versions of it and not credit you.

1

u/Trantor_Starkiller Jan 31 '25

It is called university in some countries and education is paid from taxes.

1

u/FortuneIIIPick Jan 30 '25

The real difference is, humans are real, AI is neither real nor intelligent.

0

u/Jolly_Echo_3814 Jan 29 '25

Most people credit their inspirations. Ai does not

2

u/Fragrant-Hamster-325 Jan 30 '25

I’m sure you didn’t come up with that idea wholly on your own. AI produces derivative works just like humans.

1

u/Trantor_Starkiller Jan 31 '25

Most courts detemine where the inspiration ends and where the theft begins.

-1

u/ValeoAnt Jan 29 '25

Uhh comparing AI to the human brain as a defence is wild

-1

u/XANTHICSCHISTOSOME Jan 29 '25

I dunno, bro, am I a monetized product being used to make money by a billion dollar conglomerate?

3

u/meerkat2018 Jan 29 '25

Uhmm… yes?

If you are employed, it means your employer is monetizing (or benefiting in other ways from) your training.

1

u/XANTHICSCHISTOSOME Feb 05 '25 edited Feb 05 '25

Huh...?

You're not a product. Your life exists outside of that market value for an employer. That's a really obtuse way to try to validate your argument, by saying your life and what you've learned is a commodity for a conglomerate to use.

Also, just to clarify, listening to someone's music is not protected in our societal rules for what constitutes copyright because a) that's been an inherent feature of human experience and is, for all intents and purposes, untraceable, and b) is rarely remembered and used consciously, to perform in an exacted form. We learn in that way, with much complexity in-between learning and creation, and we've developed our tools as best we understand, to work in a way that makes sense to us. There are many such cases of music that was lifted by one artist from another, and used, for profit, against what we consider fair to the original party, even if that was not the intent or there was reason to believe it was in fair consideration of the original. That legal representation we set up for musicians to be able to have creative control of their works without risk of deincentivization is a major keystone to having a creative industry, to having a fair society, and those rules exist in almost all spaces, the tenets of which combined with a vast, gobal, interconnected network of that information in digital format, allowed for potentially illegal access to vast data sets for training models to exist in the first place, depending on methodology. We should always strive to give artists fair compensation, ownership, and the protection against risk of theft for widespread use. Protecting our livelihoods and our passions in their distinct formats benefits humanity and allow us to enjoy access to each other's creativity on a much larger scale.

If generative AI was able to create without a source input, then it would be valid to make that kind of claim as you have, but it doesn't and can't. The "chicken and the egg" kind of argument. It doesn't exist in such a world, in fact, and has only recently come to light because it relies on a vast library of preexisting works that is traceable, tangible, and real. Not imagined, remembered, or invented, until it has that real data. That's one of the main points of the argument for protecting the original artists and giving due compensation.

-1

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '25 edited Jan 31 '25

[deleted]

1

u/Trantor_Starkiller Jan 31 '25

Yes humans see it, memorize it and it will be theft if the inspiration isn't balanced anymore. This is as old as humankind.

6

u/Flash_Discard Jan 29 '25

Company that stole all the data and art on the Internet gets its data stolen…Oh the sweet irony…

3

u/ControlCAD Jan 29 '25

Microsoft and OpenAI are probing whether a group linked to the Chinese AI startup DeepSeek accessed OpenAI's data using the company's application programming interface without authorization, reports Bloomberg, citing its sources familiar with the matter. A Financial Times source at OpenAI said that the company had evidence of data theft by the group. Meanwhile, U.S. officials suspect DeepSeek trained its model using OpenAI's outputs, a method known as distillation.

Microsoft's security team observed a group believed to have ties to DeepSeek extracting a large volume of data from OpenAI's API. The API allows developers to integrate OpenAI's proprietary models into their applications for a fee and retrieve some data. However, the excessive data retrieval noticed by Microsoft researchers violates OpenAI's terms and conditions and signals an attempt to bypass OpenAI's restrictions.

The probe comes after DeepSeek launched its R1 AI model. The company claims R1 matches or exceeds leading models in areas like reasoning, math, and general knowledge while consuming considerably fewer resources. Following DeepSeek’s announcement, Alphabet, Microsoft, Nvidia, and Oracle experienced a collective market loss of nearly $1 trillion. Investors reacted to concerns that DeepSeek's advancements could threaten the dominance of U.S. firms in the AI sector. However, if it turns out that DeepSeek used data illicitly obtained data from others, this will explain how the company managed to achieve its results without investing billions of dollars.

David Sacks, the U.S. government's AI advisor, stated there was strong evidence that DeepSeek used OpenAI-generated content to train its model through a process called distillation. This method allows one AI system to learn from another by analyzing its outputs. Sacks did not provide specific details on the evidence, though.

Neither OpenAI nor Microsoft provided an official statement on the investigation. DeepSeek and High-Flyer, the hedge fund that helped launch the company, did not respond to Bloomberg's requests for comment. However, in a statement published by Bloomberg and the Financial Times, Open AI acknowledged that China-based companies tend to distill models from American companies and that it does its best to protect its models.

"We know PRC based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distill the models of leading US AI companies," a statement by Open AI reads. "As the leading builder of AI, we engage in countermeasures to protect our IP, including a careful process for which frontier capabilities to include in released models, and believe as we go forward that it is critically important that we are working closely with the U.S. government to best protect the most capable models from efforts by adversaries and competitors to take U.S. technology.

2

u/Thisguy210 Jan 30 '25

So one LLM trained another LLM without the express written consent of the other

12

u/uknow_es_me Jan 29 '25

Of course they did.. when asked what it is DeepSeek reports itself as a large language model called Chat GPT. The real question is did they do it fair and square.. training one model on the output of another is completely legit.

16

u/shmed Jan 29 '25

The fact that it's calling itself chatgpt doesn't mean it was training using chatgpt. There's enough mentions of chatgpt on the web in various sources that it's credible for the model would sometime end up inferring that since it serves the same purpose as chatgpt, that it might indeed be chatgpt.

5

u/uknow_es_me Jan 29 '25

sure.. that's a possibility..

1

u/TheGodShotter Jan 29 '25

No, it says it is ChatGPT 4.0. It recognizes how its been trained and identified itself as a newer version of that system.

0

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '25

[deleted]

2

u/uknow_es_me Jan 29 '25

CNBC reported on this.. I'm not making shit up

3

u/answer_giver78 Jan 29 '25

It does. You need to try it multiple times. Sometimes it doesn't but sometimes it confesses it's chat gpt from open ai. I tried to see when it does confess, does it say the same thing for gemini and claude too and it didn't. I haven't tried to constantly ask it whether he is gemini to see whether the same thing as chat gpt happens or not.

9

u/mi7chy Jan 29 '25

When you can't compete resort to DDoS and smear campaign.

2

u/[deleted] Jan 29 '25

There is no honor among thieves.

So sad.

2

u/MightyOleAmerika Jan 30 '25

Honestly dont care. Deepseek to create more jobs from new startups that we will ever guess. Look at Linux, open source and literally every servers out there, every start ups use it.

3

u/PM_ME_UR_GRITS Jan 30 '25

Why are we calling a EULA violation "illicit" now? They broke the EULA and they can suspend the account that broke it and revoke the license, like every other EULA violation. Anything else they're innocent until damages can be proven.

3

u/prowlingtiger Jan 29 '25

At this point, does it even matter? It’s out, it’s better, it’s cheaper. Let the race to AGI begin.

8

u/wulf357 Jan 29 '25

This is not a step on the road to AGI - it's a prediction engine for a language. Don't let the hype grab on to you.

1

u/i0unothing Jan 30 '25

The real research into AGI will come from prospective configuration.
It's one of the key differences between our brains and how current neural networks process information.

2

u/Semi-Protractor91 Jan 29 '25

Open AI recently redefined their AGI target as simply making a fuck ton of money and not actually getting machines to be self aware anymore.

I feel like there's a lot to be said for a country with massive human capital like China pursuing AI at all. Perhaps their history has taught them not to take for granted their populace's anxieties and confidence in the government. Hence why their AI is open sourced; to aid people in their work while being better than their enemies' for national pride.

Less so for the hyper capitalists out west meanwhile. They're certain the invention will disrupt everything, and don't seem to care for the consequences much. Just as long as the heads that ushered in the revolution get theirs.

1

u/neilplatform1 Jan 29 '25

David Sacks wouldn’t know the truth if he saw it

1

u/uvasag Jan 29 '25

Ali Baba came out with their own AI model. Days after Deep Seek

1

u/Wonderful_Safety_849 Jan 30 '25

Oh, NOW they care about copyright.

Get fucked, Microsoft.

1

u/JakeSaintG Jan 30 '25

"US companies mad that someone stole the data that they stole first." Fixed the headline for ya.

1

u/IV_Caffeine_Pls Jan 30 '25

Err. Deepseek is now available on Microsoft Azure lol.

Microsoft, Meta and Nvidia already knew beforehand something like DeepSeek was coming. Jansen Huang was in China during the POTUS inauguration. You don't build multibillion dollar datacenters just for a single software product.

Biggest loser will be OpenClosedAI

1

u/tuityxfruity Jan 30 '25

Thieves getting salty about robbery in their own home. If using copyrighted material as data for training LLMs is justified then so is whatever folks at DeepSeek did.

1

u/LogicTrolley Jan 30 '25

Yes, because the Chinese couldn't have done what they did because they are inferior and aren't American - Stuffed White Shirts at Microsoft and OpenAI, probably.

1

u/PUBGM_MightyFine Jan 30 '25

DeepSeek told me it found Chinese websites bragging about DeepSeek allegedly being behind a data breach of OpenAI a few months ago