“DeepSeek: Don’t Panic” by Zvi

As reactions continue, the word in Washington, and out of OpenAI, is distillation. They’re accusing DeepSeek of distilling o1, of ripping off OpenAI. They claim DeepSeek *gasp* violated the OpenAI Terms of Service! The horror.

And they are very cross about this horrible violation, and if proven they plan to ‘aggressively treat it as theft,’ while the administration warns that we must put a stop to this.

Aside from the fact that this is obviously very funny, and that there is nothing they could do about it in any case, is it true?

Meanwhile Anthropic's Dario Amodei offers a reaction essay, which also includes a lot of good technical discussion of why v3 and r1 aren’t actually all that unexpected along the cost and capability curves over time, calling for America to race towards AGI to gain decisive strategic advantage over China via recursive self-improvement, although [...]

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Outline:

(01:01) Seeking Deeply

(01:41) The Market Is In DeepSeek

(06:42) Machines Not of Loving Grace

(17:49) The Kinda Six Million Dollar Model

(18:59) v3 Implies r1

(20:32) Two Can Play That Game

(21:21) Janus Explores r1's Chain of Thought Shenanigans

(24:42) In Other DeepSeek and China News

(27:29) The Quest for Sane Regulations

(29:53) Copyright Confrontation

(37:24) Vibe Gap

(41:09) Deeply Seeking Safety

(42:15) Deeply Seeking Robotics

(45:14) Thank You For Your Candor

(48:21) Thank You For Your Understanding

(51:17) The Lighter Side

The original text contained 1 footnote which was omitted from this narration.

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First published:
January 31st, 2025

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Cc2TagjY2pGAhn7MZ/deepseek-don-t-panic

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

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