Japan's Rakuten AI Model Rakuten AI 3.0 Accused of 'Skinning' China's DeepSeek V3, Sparkling Open Source Community Controversy

Japan's Rakuten Group recently released Rakuten AI 3.0, claiming it's the "largest-scale high-performance AI model in Japan". However, within 12 hours, the tech community accused it of "skinning" China's DeepSeek V3 open-source model, sparking public attention.

Tech community found that the core configuration file of Rakuten AI 3.0 on Hugging Face shows its architecture as DeepseekV3ForCausalLM, with core indicators identical to DeepSeek V3. It's alleged to be only a skin change and fine-tuning. Though DeepSeek V3 uses Apache 2.0 license (allowing commercial use) so Rakuten's act isn't illegal, it failed to credit the original creator and deleted the license file (later restored), violating open-source spirit and potentially misleading the public.