KEY TAKEAWAYS OpenAI said Wednesday that it is probing whether Chinese artificial intelligence startup DeepSeek improperly used its data to launch the low-cost model that spooked markets Monday.The comment by OpenAI follows a Bloomberg report that both OpenAI and its biggest backer Microsoft are investigating DeepSeek's model.

Alibaba claims that its Qwen2.5-Max artificial intelligence model outperformed its rivals at OpenAI, Meta and DeepSeek.

OpenAI believes DeepSeek used a process called “distillation,” which helps make smaller AI models perform better by learning from larger ones.