🚨🔥 That "$5.6M to train DeepSeek" number was always a lie.
A joint DoD/CISA advisory says DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and others ran industrial-scale distillation campaigns against U.S. frontier models since late 2024. They queried models at scale through proxies to harvest synthetic training data. The $5.6M figure doesn't include any of that.
So the "cheap Chinese AI" story was partly a bill sent to OpenAI, Anthropic, and friends. Without their knowledge.
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