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by LZ_Khan 50 days ago
It's easy to praise Deepseek for its results and generosity -- how they can keep up with frontier labs on Huawei chips for a fraction of the cost! -- but let's not forget a big part of their toolkit is heavy distillation of SoTA.
6 comments

Let's also not forget SoTA models stole from us.
True, and they're being tried in a federal court of law for it. NYT v. OpenAI is still very much alive, these things just take a while. Can the same be said about DeepSeek or any other open-source model provider performing distillation?
Pandora's box has already been opened and there is no going back. I doubt OpenAI, et al will get anything but a slap on the wrist in court because punishing AI companies would have a negative effect on the US economy.

>Can the same be said about DeepSeek or any other open-source model provider performing distillation?

Open source models that distill from SoTA reminds me of the story of Robin Hood -- robbing the rich and giving it to the poor. So to answer your question: yes, but it's better than the alternative where only a select few companies have SoTA models.

Robin Hood, famous for spinning his acts into a $220M ARR SaaS business (as of mid 2025 [0], likely >$1B by now) and using charity as a marketing mechanism.

[0] https://sqmagazine.co.uk/deepseek-ai-statistics/

touché hahah. Are there any SoTA open-source models that don't have corporate interest?
You already know what the results of this “trial” will be. Let’s not pretend.
>these thing just take a while

Oh, so people might be forced to give back the AI earnings? Should I be worried about the last year's capital gains on my portfolio?

Literally.

Altman and Amodei are so mad about muhh model when they steal our data and pollute the Internet with slop.

let's not forget that calling copyright infringement theft is hyperbole, and the claim that AI is even infringing is also dubious at best, and that the concept of intellectual property at all is also ethically dubious
So they distill the sota model where OAI/Anthropic illegally stole from public, and open weights to us or sell their API at 1/50th of the price? I'd say keep up the good work and distill more!
I could not possibly care less if I tried. Every LLM is a distillation of something else.
Who cares? Also Anthropic does the same thing - if you ask it who it is in Chinese it says it's DeepSeek LOL

https://x.com/teortaxesTex/status/2026130112685416881

All AI software is built on open source. They are just giving back what they should
What's the evidence?