It seems that OpenAI has realized this, as ChatGPT o3-mini’s new chain of thought is basically a copy of DeepSeek-R1’s. As its name suggests, an AI’s chain of thought (CoT) is a breakdown that shows how it arrived at a particular output.

OpenAI has changed the way that its new ChatGPT o3-mini model displays its chain of thought (Cot) to “make it easier for people to understand how the model thinks," however it has faced an almost immediate backlash from users and accusations that it is copying the way that DeepSeek's R1 model displays its reasoning.

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

The release of OpenAI's o3-mini comes as DeepSeek's ultra-efficient R1 model sparked a trillion-dollar tech selloff and reshaped the AI landscape.

OpenAI has updated the “chain of thought” feature of its o3-mini AI model to make it easier for users to understand how it thinks.