>That doesn't mean the deep seek technical achievements are less valid.
Well, that's literally exactly what it would mean. If DeepSeek relied on OpenAI’s API, their main achievement is in efficiency and cost reduction as opposed to fundamental AI breakthroughs.
Agreed. They accomplished a lot with distillation and optimization - but there's little reason to believe you don't also need foundational models to keep advancing. Otherwise won't they run into issues training on more synthetic data?
In a way this is something most companies have been doing with their smaller models, DeepSeek just supposedly* did it better.
Well, that's literally exactly what it would mean. If DeepSeek relied on OpenAI’s API, their main achievement is in efficiency and cost reduction as opposed to fundamental AI breakthroughs.