Final week, Chinese language lab DeepSeek launched an up to date model of its R1 reasoning AI mannequin that performs properly on quite a few math and coding benchmarks. The corporate didn’t reveal the supply of the information it used to coach the mannequin, however some AI researchers speculate that not less than a portion got here from Google’s Gemini household of AI.
Sam Paeach, a Melbourne-based developer who creates “emotional intelligence” evaluations for AI, revealed what he claims is proof that DeepSeek’s newest mannequin was skilled on outputs from Gemini. DeepSeek’s mannequin, known as R1-0528, prefers phrases and expressions much like these Google’s Gemini 2.5 Professional favors, mentioned Paeach in an X put up.
That’s not a smoking gun. However one other developer, the pseudonymous creator of a “free speech eval” for AI known as SpeechMap, famous the DeepSeek mannequin’s traces — the “ideas” the mannequin generates as it really works towards a conclusion — “learn like Gemini traces.”
DeepSeek has been accused of coaching on knowledge from rival AI fashions earlier than. In December, builders noticed that DeepSeek’s V3 mannequin usually recognized itself as ChatGPT, OpenAI’s AI-powered chatbot platform, suggesting that it might’ve been skilled on ChatGPT chat logs.
Earlier this 12 months, OpenAI instructed the Monetary Instances it discovered proof linking DeepSeek to using distillation, a way to coach AI fashions by extracting knowledge from larger, extra succesful ones. In accordance with Bloomberg, Microsoft, a detailed OpenAI collaborator and investor, detected that enormous quantities of information had been being exfiltrated by means of OpenAI developer accounts in late 2024 — accounts OpenAI believes are affiliated with DeepSeek.
Distillation isn’t an unusual observe, however OpenAI’s phrases of service prohibit clients from utilizing the corporate’s mannequin outputs to construct competing AI.
To be clear, many fashions misidentify themselves and converge on the identical phrases and turns of phrases. That’s as a result of the open net, which is the place AI firms supply the majority of their coaching knowledge, is turning into littered with AI slop. Content material farms are utilizing AI to create clickbait, and bots are flooding Reddit and X.
This “contamination,” if you’ll, has made it fairly troublesome to completely filter AI outputs from coaching datasets.
Nonetheless, AI consultants like Nathan Lambert, a researcher on the nonprofit AI analysis institute AI2, don’t assume it’s out of the query that DeepSeek skilled on knowledge from Google’s Gemini.
“If I used to be DeepSeek, I’d undoubtedly create a ton of artificial knowledge from the most effective API mannequin on the market,” Lambert wrote in a put up on X. “[DeepSeek is] brief on GPUs and flush with money. It’s actually successfully extra compute for them.”
Partly in an effort to stop distillation, AI firms have been ramping up safety measures.
In April, OpenAI started requiring organizations to finish an ID verification course of with a purpose to entry sure superior fashions. The method requires a government-issued ID from one of many nations supported by OpenAI’s API; China isn’t on the listing.
Elsewhere, Google just lately started “summarizing” the traces generated by fashions out there by means of its AI Studio developer platform, a step that makes it more difficult to coach performant rival fashions on Gemini traces. Anthropic in Could mentioned it will begin to summarize its personal mannequin’s traces, citing a necessity to guard its “aggressive benefits.”
We’ve reached out to Google for remark and can replace this piece if we hear again.
