Is ChatGPT era drawing to a close? Chinese AI startup DeepSeek takes throne on App Store

OpenAI has reportedly claimed that DeepSeek might have distilled its artificial intelligence (AI) models to build the R1 model. As per the report, the San Francisco-based AI firm stated that it has evidence that some users were using its AI models' outputs for a competitor, which is suspected to be DeepSeek. Notably, the Chinese company released the open-source DeepSeek-R1 AI model last week and hosted it on GitHub and Hugging Face. The reasoning-focused model surpassed the capabilities of the ChatGPT-maker's o1 AI models in several benchmarks.

According to a Financial Times report, OpenAI claimed that its proprietary AI models were used to train DeepSeek's models. The company told the publication that it had seen evidence of distillation from several accounts using the OpenAI application programming interface (API). The AI firm and its cloud partner Microsoft investigated the issue and blocked their access.

In a statement to the Financial Times, OpenAI said, “We know [China]-based companies — and others — are constantly trying to distil the models of leading US AI companies.” The ChatGPT-maker also highlighted that it is working closely with the US government to protect its frontier models from competitors and adversaries.