🚨 BREAKING: OpenAI says there is evidence that DeepSeek distilled the knowledge out of OpenAI's models, BREACHING its terms of use and infringing on its intellectual property. What everybody in AI should know: 1. What is knowledge distillation in AI? According to IBM: "Knowledge distillation is a machine learning technique that aims to transfer the learnings of a large pre-trained model, the 'teacher model,' to a smaller 'student model.' It’s used in deep learning as a form of model compression and knowledge transfer, particularly for massive deep neural networks. The goal of knowledge distillation is to train a more compact model to mimic a larger, more complex model. Whereas the objective in conventional deep learning is to train an artificial neural network to bring its predictions closer to the output examples provided in a training data set, the primary objective in distilling knowledge is to train the student network to match the predictions made by the teacher network." 2. What do OpenAI's terms of use say: "What you cannot do. You may not use our Services for any illegal, harmful, or abusive activity. For example, you may not: - Use our Services in a way that infringes, misappropriates or violates anyone’s rights. - Modify, copy, lease, sell or distribute any of our Services. 👉 Attempt to or assist anyone to reverse engineer, decompile or discover the source code or underlying components of our Services, including our models, algorithms, or systems (except to the extent this restriction is prohibited by applicable law). - Automatically or programmatically extract data or Output (defined below). - Represent that Output was human-generated when it was not. - Interfere with or disrupt our Services, including circumvent any rate limits or restrictions or bypass any protective measures or safety mitigations we put on our Services. 👉 Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI." If they manage to prove knowledge distillation, it might be a violation of OpenAI's terms of use, and they might take legal action against DeepSeek. If this happens, it will be a long and challenging litigation process; also, remember that OpenAI is based in the U.S., and DeepSeek is based in China. What wasn’t on your 2025 bingo card was OpenAI becoming an advocate for intellectual property rights, right? 👉 NEVER MISS my AI governance updates [including breaking news like this one]: join 49,700+ readers who subscribe to my weekly newsletter (link below).