deepseek R1

Report: DeepSeek’s chat histories and internal data were publicly exposed

AI, clickhouse, DeepSeek, deepseek R1, openai, OpenAI o1, Security / DJ Henderson / January 31, 2025

A cloud security firm found a publicly accessible, fully controllable database belonging to DeepSeek, the Chinese firm that has recently shaken up the AI world, “within minutes” of examining DeepSeek’s security, according to a blog post by Wiz.

An analytical ClickHouse database tied to DeepSeek, “completely open and unauthenticated,” contained more than 1 million instances of “chat history, backend data, and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details,” according to Wiz. An open web interface also allowed for full database control and privilege escalation, with internal API endpoints and keys available through the interface and common URL parameters.

“While much of the attention around AI security is focused on futuristic threats, the real dangers often come from basic risks—like accidental external exposure of databases,” writes Gal Nagli at Wiz’s blog. “As organizations rush to adopt AI tools and services from a growing number of startups and providers, it’s essential to remember that by doing so, we’re entrusting these companies with sensitive data. The rapid pace of adoption often leads to overlooking security, but protecting customer data must remain the top priority.”

Ars has contacted DeepSeek for comment and will update this post with any response. Wiz noted that it did not receive a response from DeepSeek regarding its findings, but after contacting every DeepSeek email and LinkedIn profile Wiz could find on Wednesday, the company protected the databases Wiz had previously accessed within half an hour.

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I agree with OpenAI: You shouldn’t use other peoples’ work without permission

AI, chatgpt, DeepSeek, deepseek R1, NVIDIA, openai / Mike M. / January 31, 2025

ChatGPT developer OpenAI and other players in the generative AI business were caught unawares this week by a Chinese company named DeepSeek, whose open source R1 simulated reasoning model provides results similar to OpenAI’s best paid models (with some notable exceptions) despite being created using just a fraction of the computing power.

Since ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, and other generative AI models first became publicly available in late 2022 and 2023, the US AI industry has been undergirded by the assumption that you’d need ever-greater amounts of training data and compute power to continue improving their models and get—eventually, maybe—to a functioning version of artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

Those assumptions were reflected in everything from Nvidia’s stock price to energy investments and data center plans. Whether DeepSeek fundamentally upends those plans remains to be seen. But at a bare minimum, it has shaken investors who have poured money into OpenAI, a company that reportedly believes it won’t turn a profit until the end of the decade.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman concedes that the DeepSeek R1 model is “impressive,” but the company is taking steps to protect its models (both language and business); OpenAI told the Financial Times and other outlets that it believed DeepSeek had used output from OpenAI’s models to train the R1 model, a method known as “distillation.” Using OpenAI’s models to train a model that will compete with OpenAI’s models is a violation of the company’s terms of service.

“We take aggressive, proactive countermeasures to protect our technology and will continue working closely with the US government to protect the most capable models being built here,” an OpenAI spokesperson told Ars.

So taking data without permission is bad, now?

I’m not here to say whether the R1 model is the product of distillation. What I can say is that it’s a little rich for OpenAI to suddenly be so very publicly concerned about the sanctity of proprietary data.

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Microsoft now hosts AI model accused of copying OpenAI data

AI, DeepSeek, deepseek R1, large langauge models, machine learning, microsoft, openai, simulated reasoning, SR models / 9u50fv / January 31, 2025

Fresh on the heels of a controversy in which ChatGPT-maker OpenAI accused the Chinese company behind DeepSeek R1 of using its AI model outputs against its terms of service, OpenAI’s largest investor, Microsoft, announced on Wednesday that it will now host DeepSeek R1 on its Azure cloud service.

DeepSeek R1 has been the talk of the AI world for the past week because it is a freely available simulated reasoning model that reportedly matches OpenAI’s o1 in performance—while allegedly being trained for a fraction of the cost.

Azure allows software developers to rent computing muscle from machines hosted in Microsoft-owned data centers, as well as rent access to software that runs on them.

“R1 offers a powerful, cost-efficient model that allows more users to harness state-of-the-art AI capabilities with minimal infrastructure investment,” wrote Microsoft Corporate Vice President Asha Sharma in a news release.

DeepSeek R1 runs at a fraction of the cost of o1, at least through each company’s own services. Comparative prices for R1 and o1 were not immediately available on Azure, but DeepSeek lists R1’s API cost as $2.19 per million output tokens, while OpenAI’s o1 costs $60 per million output tokens. That’s a massive discount for a model that performs similarly to o1-pro in various tasks.

Promoting a controversial AI model

On its face, the decision to host R1 on Microsoft servers is not unusual: The company offers access to over 1,800 models on its Azure AI Foundry service with the hopes of allowing software developers to experiment with various AI models and integrate them into their products. In some ways, whatever model they choose, Microsoft still wins because it’s being hosted on the company’s cloud service.

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Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download

AI, AI censorship, AI reasoning, Biz & IT, china, Chinese AI, DeepSeek, deepseek R1, large language models, machine learning, o1, o3, openai, OpenAI o1, simulated reasoning, SR models / Mike M. / January 21, 2025

Unlike conventional LLMs, these SR models take extra time to produce responses, and this extra time often increases performance on tasks involving math, physics, and science. And this latest open model is turning heads for apparently quickly catching up to OpenAI.

For example, DeepSeek reports that R1 outperformed OpenAI’s o1 on several benchmarks and tests, including AIME (a mathematical reasoning test), MATH-500 (a collection of word problems), and SWE-bench Verified (a programming assessment tool). As we usually mention, AI benchmarks need to be taken with a grain of salt, and these results have yet to be independently verified.

A chart of DeepSeek R1 benchmark results, created by DeepSeek. Credit: DeepSeek

TechCrunch reports that three Chinese labs—DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi—have now released models they say match o1’s capabilities, with DeepSeek first previewing R1 in November.

But the new DeepSeek model comes with a catch if run in the cloud-hosted version—being Chinese in origin, R1 will not generate responses about certain topics like Tiananmen Square or Taiwan’s autonomy, as it must “embody core socialist values,” according to Chinese Internet regulations. This filtering comes from an additional moderation layer that isn’t an issue if the model is run locally outside of China.

Even with the potential censorship, Dean Ball, an AI researcher at George Mason University, wrote on X, “The impressive performance of DeepSeek’s distilled models (smaller versions of r1) means that very capable reasoners will continue to proliferate widely and be runnable on local hardware, far from the eyes of any top-down control regime.”

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