Microsoft is now hosting DeepSeek R1, even though it suspects it of illegal data abuse

A hot potato: Microsoft is raising eyebrows after announcing that it will host DeepSeek R1 on its Azure cloud service. The decision comes just days after OpenAI accused DeepSeek of violating its terms of service by allegedly using ChatGPT outputs to train its system, allegations Microsoft is currently investigating.

DeepSeek R1 began making waves in the AI world when it launched last week. Chinese developer DeepSeek touted it as a freely available simulated reasoning model that rivals OpenAI's o1 in performance but at a fraction of the training cost. While OpenAI has priced its o1 model at $60 per million output tokens, DeepSeek lists R1 at just $2.19 per million – a remarkable contrast that sunk stock for AI-adjacent companies like Nvidia.

Microsoft's decision to host R1 on Azure is not too unusual on its surface. The tech giant already offers over 1,800 AI models through its ...