It's easy to praise Deepseek for its results and generosity -- how they can keep up with frontier labs on Huawei chips for a fraction of the cost! -- but let's not forget a big part of their toolkit is heavy distillation of SoTA.
>Can the same be said about DeepSeek or any other open-source model provider performing distillation?
Open source models that distill from SoTA reminds me of the story of Robin Hood -- robbing the rich and giving it to the poor. So to answer your question: yes, but it's better than the alternative where only a select few companies have SoTA models.
Oh, so people might be forced to give back the AI earnings? Should I be worried about the last year's capital gains on my portfolio?
Altman and Amodei are so mad about muhh model when they steal our data and pollute the Internet with slop.