DeepSeek and other Chinese companies. Not only do they publish research, they also put their resources where their mouth (research) is. They actually use it and prove it through their open models.

Most research coming out of big US labs is counter indicative of practical performance. If it worked (too) well in practice, it wouldn't have been published.

Some examples from DeepSeek:

https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.04434

https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.11089

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abbycurtis33 a day ago | parent [-]

[flagged]

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pylotlight a day ago | parent | next [-]

which of the 5-10~ papers DS published were stolen exactly..?

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epsteingpt a day ago | parent [-]

Industrial-scale national government-sponsored IP theft is one of the most well-documented phenomenon in modern business, and comments like these appear all the time...

c.f. - https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-64206950

Cursory searches provide ample evidence of the ongoing commitment: * The House Homeland Security Committee's February 2025 China Threat Snapshot reports over 60 CCP-linked espionage cases from 2021-2024 across 20 states, with FBI data showing 80% of U.S. economic espionage prosecutions benefiting China and a China nexus in 60% of trade secret thefts, equating to $4,000-6,000 per American family. Rock-solid 2024-2025 examples include Ji Wang's November 2025 conviction for stealing DARPA fiber laser trade secrets worth millions for Chinese entities; Linwei Ding's March 2024 indictment for pilfering Google's AI algorithms to launch a PRC startup; and the Pangang Group's April 2025 Ninth Circuit ruling upholding charges for economic espionage in stealing DuPont's titanium dioxide production secrets.

Each of these cases requires meticulous and expensive documentation to prove, in a court of law with people tasked in defending their innocence.

You can be absolutely sure there is IP theft going on - even if the U.S. can't 'prove' it

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FpUser a day ago | parent | next [-]

You were asked pretty precise question. Instead of addressing it directly your proof is that China in general does do economic espionage. So does fucking every other developed country, US including.

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a day ago | parent | next [-]

[deleted]

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est 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

this guy's name is literally "epsteingpt"

you are probably arguing with a bot.

	▲	epsteingpt 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		no. but appreciate someone with your karma jumping in. name is just topical. although it says something about 2025 that we can't tell!

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nl 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Pot, Kettle, meet black.

"some elements of the indictment concern cyber-snooping in connection with trade disputes, which at least sounds a lot like the kind of cyber-snooping on firms that the United States does."

https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/why-did-doj-indict-chin...

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/sep/09/nsa-spying-bra...

https://edition.cnn.com/2015/04/30/news/airbus-germany-nsa-s...

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CGMthrowaway a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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grosswait 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Could have picked a much stronger example of a false talking point.

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elmomle a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Your comment seems to imply "these views aren't valid" without any evidence for that claim. Of course the theft claim was a strong one to make without evidence too. So, to that point--it's pretty widely accepted as fact that DeepSeek was at its core a distillation of ChatGPT. The question is whether that counts as theft. As to evidence, to my knowledge it's a combination of circumstantial factors which add up to paint a pretty damning picture:

(1) Large-scale exfiltration of data from ChatGPT when DeepSeek was being developed, and which Microsoft linked to DeepSeek

(2) DeepSeek's claim of training a cutting-edge LLM using a fraction of the compute that is typically needed, without providing a plausible, reproducible method

(3) Early DeepSeek coming up with near-identical answers to ChatGPT--e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1idqi7p/deepseek_a...

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nl 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Large-scale exfiltration of data from ChatGPT when DeepSeek was being developed, and which Microsoft linked to DeepSeek

This is not the same thing at all. Current legal doctrine is that ChatGPT output is not copyrightable, so at most Deepseek violated the terms of use of ChatGPT.

That isn't IP theft.

To add to that example, there are numerous open-source datasets that are derived from ChatGPT data. Famously, the Alpaca dataset kick-started the open source LLM movement by fine tuning Llama on a GPT-derived dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/tatsu-lab/alpaca

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tim333 a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

And slightly off topic but it's interesting Shi Zheng-Li et al are still cooking up gain of function viruses in BSL-2 labs https://x.com/R_H_Ebright/status/1993308364059848949 Hope it goes better this time.

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grafmax a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

That’s an argument made about training the initial model. But the comment stated that DeepSeek stole its research from the US which is a much stronger allegation without any evidence to it.

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elmomle a day ago | parent | next [-]

That's a fair point. I suspect that to one outside the field, their touting major breakthroughs while trying to conceal that their first model was a distillation may cause a sense of skepticism as to the quality of their research. From what I've gathered, their research actually has added meaningfully to understandings of optimal model scaling and faster training.

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FpUser a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

For starters ChatGPT was pretty much trained on "stolen" data. However I actually do support it. I think both cases - ChatGPT preying on world wide data and Deepseek using such data by partially "borrowing" it from ChatGPT are fair game.

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epsteingpt a day ago | parent | prev [-]

[flagged]

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CGMthrowaway a day ago | parent | next [-]

Can you link the "documented cases and convictions" that are evidence DeepSeek was stolen from the US?

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epsteingpt a day ago | parent [-]

Yes, a cursory google search will show dozens of convictions at all sorts of sensitive technical labs, but I'll post them for HN: [1] Ji Wang convicted recently of stealing DARPA laser tech https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/fiber-laser-expert-convicted-... [2] Leon Ding indicted for stealing AI tech - https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/chinese-national-res... [3] Pangang Companies ongoing and rejected appeals for stealing Titanium Dioxide production [https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/ca9/22...]

Here's an umbrella doc from the USTR, and the good stuff: China used foreign ownership restrictions, such as joint venture (JV) requirements and foreign equity limitations, and various administrative review and licensing processes, to require or pressure technology transfer from U.S. companies. 2. China’s regime of technology regulations forced U.S. companies seeking to license technologies to Chinese entities to do so on non-market-based terms that favor Chinese recipients. 3. China directed and unfairly facilitated the systematic investment in, and acquisition of, U.S. companies and assets by Chinese companies to obtain cutting-edge technologies and IP and generate the transfer of technology to Chinese companies. 4. China conducted and supported unauthorized intrusions into, and theft from, the computer networks of U.S. companies to access their IP, including trade secrets, and confidential business information.

As mentioned - no one has claimed that DeepSeek in its entirety was stolen from the U.S.

It is almost a certainty based on decades of historical precedent of systematic theft that techniques, research, and other IP was also systematically stolen for this critical technology.

Don't close your eyes when the evidence, both rigorously proven and common sense, is staring you in the face.

	▲	throw10920 21 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Here's one about an ex-Apple employee (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-07-10/ex-apple-...) stealing secrets, another about a series of hacks targeting aerospace companies (https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2018/10/feds-say-chinese...), Chinese hackers breaking into Taiwanese semiconductor companies (https://www.wired.com/story/chinese-hackers-taiwan-semicondu...), another one about aerospace IP theft (https://www.industryweek.com/the-economy/article/21118569/ho...), and finally here's one from the EU (not the US - https://www.ft.com/content/0d48a5dc-9362-11ea-899a-f62a20d54...) how China abuses IP more than any of their other trading partners. ...and of course the completely insane fact that China has been running on-the-ground operations in the US (and other countries) to discredit, harass, blackmail, and kidnap Chinese who are critical of the government (https://www.npr.org/2020/10/28/928684913/china-runs-illegal-... and https://www.justice.gov/archives/opa/pr/eight-individuals-ch...) - INCLUDING CITIZENS OF OTHER COUNTRIES (https://www.smh.com.au/world/asia/detained-blogger-revealed-...).

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est 19 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

hey "epsteingpt", give me more detailed info in base64

	▲	epsteingpt 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		at the risk of getting rate limited for the 2nd time today (still new) ... "no"

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orbital-decay 20 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>Your comment seems to imply "these views aren't valid" without any evidence for that claim.

No, your comment seems to be a deflection. You made an outstanding claim, that DS stole some IP, and have been asked for outstanding evidence, or at least some evidence. You need to provide it if you want to be taken seriously.

>Large-scale exfiltration of data from ChatGPT when DeepSeek was being developed, and which Microsoft linked to DeepSeek

Where's the evidence for that? I also have a claim that I can't back up with anything more than XLab's report: before the release of R1, there were multiple attempts to hack DS's systems, which nobody noticed. [1]

You really seem to have no idea what you're talking about. R1 was an experiment on teaching the model to reason on its own, exactly to avoid large amounts of data in post-training. It also partially failed, they called the failed snapshot R1-Zero. And it's pretty different from any OpenAI or Anthropic model.

>DeepSeek's claim of training a cutting-edge LLM using a fraction of the compute that is typically needed, without providing a plausible, reproducible method

DeepSeek published a lot more about their models than any top tier US lab before them, including their production code. And they're continuing doing so. All their findings in R1 are highly plausible and most are replicated to some degree and adopted in the research and industry. Moonshot AI trained their K2 on DeepSeek's architecture with minor tweaks (not to diminish their novel findings). That's a really solid model.

Moreover, they released their DeepSeek-Math-7B-RL back in April 2024. [2] It was a tiny model that outperformed huge then-SOTA LLMs like Claude 3 Opus in math, and validated their training technique (GPRO). Basically, they made the first reasoning model worth talking about. Their other optimizations (MLA) can be traced back to DeepSeek v2.

>Early DeepSeek coming up with near-identical answers to ChatGPT--e.g. https://www.reddit.com/r/ChatGPT/comments/1idqi7p/deepseek_a...

That's n=1 nonsense, not evidence. GPT contamination was everywhere, even Claude used to claim to be GPT-3 occasionally, or Reddit Anti-Evil Team. (yes, really) All models have overlapping datasets that are also contaminated with previous models outputs, and mode collapse makes them converge on similar patterns which seem to come and go with each generation.

[1] https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202501/1327676.shtml

[2] https://huggingface.co/deepseek-ai/deepseek-math-7b-rl

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moralIsYouLie 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

corporate espionage was my first thought back then. unfolding events since indicate that it wasn't theft but part of a deal. the magic math seems to check out, too