4 ms·

If you care about improvement of models, you would support the US labs here. It costs hundreds of millions of dollars to train a frontier model. It's not just

• YetAnotherNick 8mo ago
  > incentivizes labs to withhold their models from the public. This is the only way they make money.
• wpm 8mo ago
  > If you care about improvement of models, you would support the US labs here. I guess I don't care then.
  • LZ_Khan 8mo ago
    that's fair!
• ElevenLathe 8mo ago
  How much did it cost to produce all the data on the internet and every book ever published? Surely even the most conservative calculations put it at multiple years of planetary GDP. The same argument can be made to say that letting the big labs get away with pirating it will disincentivize people to publish anything.
  • ceroxylon 8mo ago
    I personally have stopped publishing publicly, since my research is still on the fuzzy boundary of AI's current knowledge, my website gets scraped daily, and I don't want to contribute to paid models for zero acknowledgement or compensation.
    • Imustaskforhelp 8mo ago
      > I personally have stopped publishing publicly, since my research is still on the fuzzy boundary of AI's current knowledge, my website gets scraped daily, and I don't want to contribute to paid models for zero acknowledgement or compensation. I don't know about your works so pardon me but thinking about it, would a better solution be for gated communities at the very least, say matrix or xmpp or irc be better? I suppose that scraping bots of matrix would be quite hard for AI companies to setup? but anyone interested in reading your contents can still find the data if they are interested plus you get the additional benefit of a community/like-minded people.
  • piva00 8mo ago
    Not only publishing, it has already disincentivised a huge part of what made Web 2.0: public APIs for data access to platforms. It was amazing to be able to create some toy projects using data from big platforms, now they're all afraid LLM trainers will scrape their contents and create a competitor to their moat, the data. It just sucks at many different levels.
• contravariant 8mo ago
  If 'we' really cared about the improvement of models all of them would be public. Anything else just proves someone prefers making money to improving the models.
• bigyabai 8mo ago
  This reads a bit like over-moralizing to me. US labs will continue improving their models because they have to make money in a competitive market. Chinese distillations have arguably improved the status-quo, with Qwen and R1 forcing GPT-OSS to be released to the public. American businesses are competing, and American customers are getting better products because of the competitive pressure on them. Your purported "prisoner's dilemma" hasn't happened yet to my knowledge, instead we seem to see the opposite. The high-speed development velocity has forced US labs to release more often with less nebulous results. Supporting either side will contribute to healthier competition in the long run.
• falcor84 8mo ago
  I think that the bigger conversation to be had here is about the environmental damage - if by using distillation we can really train new models at 1% of the cost in energy, it is ethically imperative that we do this.
• falcor84 8mo ago
  > incentivizes labs to withhold their models from the public. Does it really? How would they get revenue if they withhold their models? And doesn't economics generally say that if it's easier for your competitor to catch up, you have a higher incentive to maintain your lead?
• hermanzegerman 8mo ago
  Tell me how they obtained that data? Nobody feels sorry for big Multinationals trying to skirt Copyright for their own good, but then cry about it when their competition ignores it too. You can't have your cake and eat it