ChatGPT maker OpenAI has become the subject of widespread mockery online after whining that buzzy Chinese AI startup DeepSeek stole its intellectual property — despite indiscriminately ripping off other people’s work itself for many years. The Sam Altman-led company told the Financial Times that it had “some evidence” of DeepSeek stealing its intellectual property, training its AI models on the output of OpenAI’s models. DeepSeek threw Silicon Valley into complete chaos earlier this week, wiping out over $1 trillion worth of market capitalization in a single day. Its R1 model impressed with a performance that can rival OpenAI’s most sophisticated models while using a tiny fraction of the resources. The glaring hypocrisy of OpenAI ripping off human creatives and then accusing DeepSeek of vacuuming up its work to build a better product didn’t go unnoticed. “I’m so sorry I can’t stop laughing,” AI critic Ed Zitron wrote in a scathing post. “OpenAI, the company built on stealing literally the entire internet, is crying because DeepSeek may have trained on the outputs from ChatGPT.” “Hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha hahahhahahahahahahahahahahaha,” 404 Media’s Jason Koebler wrote in a post about the situation. “The irony here is palpable,” another user wrote. “You can’t steal from us!” one user joked. “We stole it fair and square!” Other users pointed out that despite having the word “open” in its company name, OpenAI is a closed-source, for-profit entity. Meanwhile, DeepSeek’s AI models actually are open source. “Unlike OpenAI, DeepSeek is open AI,” one X-formerly-Twitter user wrote. OpenAI’s whining didn’t muster much sympathy….OpenAI Hit With Wave of Mockery for Crying That Someone Stole Its Work Without Permission to Build a Competing Product