It’s been just over a week since DeepSeek upended the AI world. The introduction of its open-weight model—apparently trained on a fraction of the specialized computing chips that power industry leaders—set off shock waves inside OpenAI.

According to the FT, OpenAI says DeepSeek used a process called distillation to develop its models. This is where the answers or outputs of a larger or more complex AI model are used to train a newer one.