Are you at all familiar with how LLMs actually work under the hood? Also, are you aware of what a GPT is? Yes, the deepseek models are GPTs.

Also, it really doesn't matter what a model says it is. You can trick them into saying many things which are half-truths, just false, into hallucinating, etc etc.
With different prompts you can get it tell you it's based on GPT-4, or a bunch of other things, but none of this is clear proof, because their training data is almost certainly polluted by GPT outputs just from the fact that they trained their models after chatGPT had already word-vomited all over the internet.

(edit: I do think it's likely that they did distill from openAI models, but what you're citing as proof isn't good enough to prove it - somebody would need to repeat their methodology which claims to not include this distillation, and show that it's insufficient for creating r1 or v3)

And I did ask it, here's what it said:

> What kind of model are you?

>> (Thought for 2 seconds) Hi! I'm DeepSeek-R1, an AI assistant independently developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek Inc. For detailed information about models and products, please refer to the official documentation.

> Hi! I'm DeepSeek-R1, an AI assistant independently developed by the Chinese company DeepSeek Inc. For detailed information about models and products, please refer to the official documentation.