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In 2024, DeepSeek's researchers used the DeepSeek-R1 model to transfer knowledge to a smaller model using distillation: https://malted.ai/deepseek-and-the-futu

by pyman 1y ago

In 2024, DeepSeek's researchers used the DeepSeek-R1 model to transfer knowledge to a smaller model using distillation: https://malted.ai/deepseek-and-the-future-of-distillation/ https://malted.ai/deepseek-and-the-future-of-distillation/ Honest question: Isn't this exactly what the DeepSeek team did, and now Anthropic is repackaging it a year later, calling it “subliminal learning” or using the teacher and student analogy to take credit for work done by Chinese researchers? It's like if China claimed they invented the Transformer by renaming it the “Pattern Matching architecture.” Why is Anthropic doing this? Isn't this the same company that recently scraped 7 million books? And now they’re “transforming” research papers too?

Icko_ 1y ago
distillation and teacher-student models are definitely way older than 2024.
- pyman 1y ago
  My point is: OpenAI raised $40 billion and Anthropic raised $10 billion, claiming they needed the money to buy more expensive Nvidia servers to train bigger models. Then Chinese experts basically said, no you don't. And they proved it.
  - ACCount36 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - pyman 1y ago
      Those of us who live outside the US don't think like that. We love German cars, Chinese phones, Korean TV series and Vietnamese food. Our taste is not guided by ideology, it's guided by quality and value. In school, for example, they taught me that Russia won the "space race" by sending Yuri Gagarin into orbit and making him the first human in space, and the US won the "moon race." What I'm saying is, not all of us live in the same country or have to choose between black or white. We think it's fair to give credit where it's due.
      - ACCount36 1y ago
        [flagged]
rcxdude 1y ago
>and now Anthropic is repackaging it a year later, calling it “subliminal learning” No, distillation and student/teacher is a well known technique (much older than even the original chatGPT), and Anthropic are not claiming to have invented it (it would be laughable to anyone familiar with the field). "subliminal learning" is an observation by Anthropic about something surprising that can happen during the process, which is that, for sufficiently similar models, behaviour can be transferred from student to teacher that is not obviously present in the information transferred between them (i.e. text outputted from the teacher and used to train the student. For example, the student's "favourite animal" changed despite the fact that the teacher was only creating 'random' numbers for the student to try to predict)
- pyman 1y ago
  > something surprising that can happen during the process, which is that, for sufficiently similar models, behaviour can be transferred from student to teacher By "behaviour" they mean data and pattern matching, right? Alan Turing figured that out in the 1940s. LLMs aren't black boxes doing voodoo, like we like to tell politicians and regulators. They're just software processing massive amounts of data to find patterns and predict what comes next. It looks magical, but it's maths and stats, not magic. This post is just selling second-hand ideas. And for those of us outside the US who spend all day reading scientific papers, sorry Anthropic, we're not buying it.
  - ben_w 1y ago
    > By "behaviour" they mean data and pattern matching, right? Alan Turing figured that out in the 1940s. That's like saying Da Vinci figured out heavier-than-air flight. Useful foundation, obviously smart and on the right track, still didn't actually do enough to get all the credit for that. > It looks magical, but it's maths and stats, not magic. People keep saying "AI isn't magic, it's just maths" like this is some kind of gotcha. Turning lead into gold isn't the magic of alchemy, it's just nucleosynthesis. Taking a living human's heart out without killing them, and replacing it with one you got out a corpse, that isn't the magic of necromancy, neither is it a prayer or ritual to Sekhmet, it's just transplant surgery. And so on: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAwvJDRKWFibjxh4e/it-isn-t-magic https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAwvJDRKWFibjxh4e/it-isn-t-m... Even with access to the numbers and mechanisms, the inner workings of LLMs are as clear as mud and still full of surprises. Anthropic's work was, to many people, one such surprise.

by pyman 1y ago

Icko_ 1y ago

distillation and teacher-student models are definitely way older than 2024.

pyman 1y ago
My point is: OpenAI raised $40 billion and Anthropic raised $10 billion, claiming they needed the money to buy more expensive Nvidia servers to train bigger models. Then Chinese experts basically said, no you don't. And they proved it.
- ACCount36 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - pyman 1y ago
    Those of us who live outside the US don't think like that. We love German cars, Chinese phones, Korean TV series and Vietnamese food. Our taste is not guided by ideology, it's guided by quality and value. In school, for example, they taught me that Russia won the "space race" by sending Yuri Gagarin into orbit and making him the first human in space, and the US won the "moon race." What I'm saying is, not all of us live in the same country or have to choose between black or white. We think it's fair to give credit where it's due.
    - ACCount36 1y ago
      [flagged]

rcxdude 1y ago

>and now Anthropic is repackaging it a year later, calling it “subliminal learning” No, distillation and student/teacher is a well known technique (much older than even the original chatGPT), and Anthropic are not claiming to have invented it (it would be laughable to anyone familiar with the field). "subliminal learning" is an observation by Anthropic about something surprising that can happen during the process, which is that, for sufficiently similar models, behaviour can be transferred from student to teacher that is not obviously present in the information transferred between them (i.e. text outputted from the teacher and used to train the student. For example, the student's "favourite animal" changed despite the fact that the teacher was only creating 'random' numbers for the student to try to predict)

pyman 1y ago
> something surprising that can happen during the process, which is that, for sufficiently similar models, behaviour can be transferred from student to teacher By "behaviour" they mean data and pattern matching, right? Alan Turing figured that out in the 1940s. LLMs aren't black boxes doing voodoo, like we like to tell politicians and regulators. They're just software processing massive amounts of data to find patterns and predict what comes next. It looks magical, but it's maths and stats, not magic. This post is just selling second-hand ideas. And for those of us outside the US who spend all day reading scientific papers, sorry Anthropic, we're not buying it.
- ben_w 1y ago
  > By "behaviour" they mean data and pattern matching, right? Alan Turing figured that out in the 1940s. That's like saying Da Vinci figured out heavier-than-air flight. Useful foundation, obviously smart and on the right track, still didn't actually do enough to get all the credit for that. > It looks magical, but it's maths and stats, not magic. People keep saying "AI isn't magic, it's just maths" like this is some kind of gotcha. Turning lead into gold isn't the magic of alchemy, it's just nucleosynthesis. Taking a living human's heart out without killing them, and replacing it with one you got out a corpse, that isn't the magic of necromancy, neither is it a prayer or ritual to Sekhmet, it's just transplant surgery. And so on: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAwvJDRKWFibjxh4e/it-isn-t-magic https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/hAwvJDRKWFibjxh4e/it-isn-t-m... Even with access to the numbers and mechanisms, the inner workings of LLMs are as clear as mud and still full of surprises. Anthropic's work was, to many people, one such surprise.