Feb 12 (Reuters) – OpenAI has warned U.S. lawmakers that Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek targeted the ChatGPT maker and the nation's AI labs to "distill" information to train its own models, a memo seen by Reuters showed. The distillation technique involves having an older, more established and powerful AI model evaluate the quality of the answers coming out of a newer model, effectively transferring the older model's learnings. In a memo to the U.S. House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the U.S. and the Chinese Communist Party, OpenAI said: "We have observed accounts associated with DeepSeek employees developing methods to circumvent OpenAI's access restrictions and access models through obfuscated third-party routers and other ways that mask their source." "We also know that DeepSeek employees developed code to access U.S. AI models and obtain outputs for distillation in programmatic ways," the memo added. DeepSeek and its parent company High-Flyer did not immediately respond to Reuters' requests for comment. DeepSeek shook markets early last year with a set of AI models that rivaled some of the best offerings from the U.S. but were developed with far less computing power, fuelling concerns in Washington that China could catch up in the AI race despite U.S. restrictions on the sale of high-powered computing chips to China. (Reporting by Fabiola Arámburo in Mexico City and Deepa Seetharaman in San Francisco; Editing by Alan Barona)
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