4 ms·
Grey market fast-follow via distillation seems like an inevitable feature of the near to medium future. I've previously doubted that the N-1 or N-2 open weight
by NiloCK 8mo ago
Grey market fast-follow via distillation seems like an inevitable feature of the near to medium future.
I've previously doubted that the N-1 or N-2 open weight models will ever be attractive to end users, especially power users. But it now seems that user preferences will be yet another saturated benchmark, that even the N-2 models will fully satisfy.
Heck, even my own preferences may be getting saturated already. Opus 4.5 was a very legible jump from 4.1. But 4.6? Apparently better, but it hasn't changed my workflows or the types of problems / questions I put to it.
It's poetic - the greatest theft in human history followed by the greatest comeuppance.
No end-user on planet earth will suffer a single qualm at the notion that their bargain-basement Chinese AI provider 'stole' from American big tech.
- miohtama 8mo agoIn some ways, Opus 4.6 is a step backwards due to massively higher token consumption.
- nwienert 8mo agoFor me, it's just plain worse.
- cmrdporcupine 8mo agoTry Codex / GPT 5.3 instead. Basically superior in all respects, and the codex CLI uses 1/10 the memory and doesn't have stupid bugs. And I can use my subscription in opencode, too. Anthropic has blown their lead in coding.
- toraway 8mo agoYeah, I have been loving GPT 5.2/3 once I figured out how to change to High reasoning in OpenCode. It has been crushing every request that would have gone to Opus at a fraction of the cost considering the massively increased quota of the cheap Codex plan with official OpenCode support. I just roll my eyes now whenever I see HN comments defending Anthropic and suggesting OpenCode users are being petulant TOS-violating children asking for the moon. Like, why would I be voluntarily subjected to worse, more expensive and locked down plan from Anthropic that has become more enshittified every month since I originally subscribed given Codex exists and is just as good? It won't last forever I'm sure but for now Codex is ridiculously good value without OpenAI crudely trying to enforce vendor lock-in. I hate so much about this absurd AI/VC era in tech but aggressive competition is still a big bright spot.
- cmrdporcupine 8mo agoI like using Codex inside OpenCode, but frankly most times I just use it inside Codex itself because O.Ai has clearly made major improvements to it in the last 3 months -- performance and stability -- instead of mucking around trying to vibe code a buggy "game loop" in React on a VT100 terminal.
- toraway 8mo agoI had been using Codex for a couple weeks after dropping Claude Code to evaluate as a baseline vs OpenCode and agreed, it is a very solid CLI that has improved a lot since it was originally released. I mainly use OC just because I had refined my workflow and like reducing lock-in in general, but Codex CLI is definitely much more pleasant to use than CC.
- cmrdporcupine 8mo agoYeah, if the eng team working on it is on this forum: kudos to you. Thanks.
- chillfox 8mo agoyeah, I am still using 4.5 for coding. I have started using Gemini Flash on high for general cli questions as I can't tell the difference for those "what's the command again" type questions and it's cheap/fast/accurate.
- theshrike79 8mo agoYou need to adjust the effort from the default (High) to Medium to match the token usage of 4.5 High is for people with infinite budgets and Anthropic employees. =)
- jaccola 8mo agoI have no idea how an LLM company can make any argument that their use of content to train the models is allowed that doesn't equally apply to the distillers using an LLM output. "The distilled LLM isn't stealing the content from the 'parent' LLM, it is learning from the content just as a human would, surely that can't be illegal!"...
- mikehearn 8mo agoThe argument is that converting static text into an LLM is sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair use, while distilling one LLM's output to create another LLM is not. Whether you buy that or not is up to you, but I think that's the fundamental difference.
- zozbot234 8mo agoThe whole notion of 'distillation' at a distance is extremely iffy anyway. You're just training on LLM chat logs, but that's nowhere near enough to even loosely copy or replicate the actual model. You need the weights for that.
- budududuroiu 8mo ago> The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has affirmed a district court ruling that human authorship is a bedrock requirement to register a copyright, and that an artificial intelligence system cannot be deemed the author of a work for copyright purposes > The court’s decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter,1 on March 18, 2025, supports the position adopted by the United States Copyright Office and is the latest chapter in the long-running saga of an attempt by a computer scientist to challenge that fundamental principle. I, like many others, believe the only way AI won't immediately get enshittified is by fighting tooth and nail for LLM output to never be copyrightable https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appellate-court-affirms-human-authorship https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell...
- roywiggins 8mo agoThaler v. Perlmutter is an a weird case because Thaler explicitly disclaimed human authorship and tried to register a machine as the author. Whereas someone trying to copyright LLM output would likely insist that there is human authorship is via the choice of prompts and careful selection of the best LLM output. I am not sure if claims like that have been tested.
- throwaw12 8mo agonot allowing distillation should be illegal :) One can create 1000s of topic specific AI generated content websites, as a disclaimer each post should include prompt and used model. Others can "accidentally" crawl those websites and include in their training/fine-tuning.
- vessenes 8mo agoJust to say - 4.6 really shines on working longer without input. It feels to me like it gets twice as far. I would not want to go back.
- cmrdporcupine 8mo agoIf that's what they're tuning for, that's just not what I want. So I'm glad I switched off of Anthropic. What teams of programmers need, when AI tooling is thrown into the mix, is more interaction with the codebase, not less. To build reliable systems the humans involved need to know what was built and how. I'm not looking for full automation, I'm looking for intelligence and augmentation, and I'll give my money and my recommendation as team lead / eng manager to whatever product offers that best.
- p1esk 8mo agoI'm not looking for full automation But your boss probably is.
- wyre 8mo agoFull automation is also possible by putting your coding agent into a loop. The point is that an LLM that can solve a small task is more valuable for quality output, than an LLM that can solve a larger task autonomously.
- vidarh 8mo agoThat sounds like wishful thinking. Every client I work for wants to reduce the rate at which humans need to intervene. You might not want that, but odds are your CEO does. And babysitting intermediate stages is not productive use of developer time.
- officialchicken 8mo agoAnd the odds are good you use the models and understand them in detail while the CEO is just buying the hype, ill informed or not.
- deaux 8mo ago> But 4.6? Apparently better, but it hasn't changed my workflows or the types of problems / questions I put to it. The incremental steps are now more domain-specific. For example, Codex 5.3 is supposedly improved at agentic use (tools, skills). Opus 4.6 is markedly better at frontend UI design than 4.5. I'm sure at some point we'll see across-the-board noticeable improvement again, but that would probably be a major version rather than minor.
- jona-f 8mo ago"the greatest theft in human history" what a nonsense. I was curious, how the AI haters will cope, now that the tides here have changed. We have built systems that can look at any output and replicate it. That is progress. If you think some particular sequence of numbers belongs to you, you are wrong. Current intellectual property laws are crooked. You are stuck in a crooked system.
- benterix 8mo ago> No end-user on planet earth will suffer a single qualm at the notion that their bargain-basement Chinese AI provider 'stole' from American big tech. Just like nobody cares[0] that American big tech stole from authors of millions of books. [0] Interestingly, the only ones that cared were the FB employees told to pirate the Library Genesis and reporting back that "it didn't feel right".
- DannyBee 8mo agoAs one of those authors (3 books in this case) I'll just point out: Most authors don't own any interesting rights to their books because they are works for hire. Maybe I would have gotten something, maybe not. Depends on the contract. One of my books that was used is from 1996. That contract did not say a lot about the internet, and I was also 16 at the time ;) In practice they stole from a relatively small number of publishers. The rest is PR. The settlement goes to authors in part because anything else would generate immensely bad PR. As usual, nothing is really black and white
- hasperdi 8mo agoWhy distill, if you can run the full model yourself... or at other inference providers. Quantization the better approach in most cases, unless you want to for instance create hybrid models ie. distilling from here and there.