I understand the temptation to go there, but I think it misses the point. I have no qualms at all with the idea that the sum total of intelligence distributed across the internet was siphoned away from creators and piped through an engine that now cynically seeks to replace them. Believe me, I will grab my pitchfork and march side by side with you.
But let's keep the eye on the ball for a second. None of that changes the fact that what was built was a capability to reflect that knowledge in dynamic and deep ways in conversation, as well as image and audio recognition.
And did Deepseek also build that? From scratch? Because they might not have.
Look at it this way. Even OpenAI uses their own models' output to train subsequent models. They do pay for a lot of manual annotations but also use a lot of machine generated data because it is cheaper and good enough, especially from the bigger models.
So say DS had simply published a paper outlining the RL technique they used, and one of Meta, Google or even OpenAI themselves had used it to train a new model, don't you think they'd have shouted off the rooftops about a new breakthrough? The fact that the provenance of the data is from a rival's model does not negate the value of the research IMHO.
But let's keep the eye on the ball for a second. None of that changes the fact that what was built was a capability to reflect that knowledge in dynamic and deep ways in conversation, as well as image and audio recognition.
And did Deepseek also build that? From scratch? Because they might not have.