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

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...

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