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OpenAI vs. DeepSeek: The Distillation Battle Shaping Next-Gen AI

OpenAI accused DeepSeek of inappropriately leveraging their model to perform model distillation. What is this technique, and is it ok to use?

7 min read

Feb 14, 2025

The latest hype in the AI sphere has included accusations surrounding two heavyweights: OpenAI and DeepSeek.

But unlike the Tyson vs. Paul fight, this battle doesn’t have a clear winner.

Released on January 20th, DeepSeek’s R1 made history within a week, triggering one of the largest single-day losses in US stock market history (a bad day for NVIDIA).

R1’s power play was the fact that it performed nearly as well as OpenAI's most advanced models (and allegedly 1000x cheaper to build than GPT-4).

Now, we have an idea of just how they did it.