I thought this was common knowledge. DeepSeek’s Wikipedia entry says that they trained all their models on Nvidia chips procured before the U.S. embargo to China on them. It wouldn’t surprise me if they continued acquiring them through, well, less than legal means.

I also read somewhere (not Wikipedia) that they trained on ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini queries, basically feeding in the output of competitor’s LLMs as training data. Kinda surprised they didn’t run into model collapse problems, but they stole their training data from other people who stole their training data from data collections that arguably stole them from content creators. It’s bandits all the way down, so adding a little smuggling to that doesn’t surprise me.