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> These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is Unfortunately, the Reuters piece itself is complicit in this dra
by anon373839 4mo ago
> These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is
Unfortunately, the Reuters piece itself is complicit in this dramatization. The lede paragraph parrots Anthropic's talking point that distillation is an "attack", without using quotes that would alert the reader that this framing is a corporate talking point. Distillation is NOT an attack.
- p4coder 4mo agoAgreed! I had to do a double take and check the URL. I thought I am reading a press release rather than actual reporting.
- da_grift_shift 4mo agoSame thing nowadays :^)
- verisimi 4mo agoIt always was.
- soperj 4mo agoThat's exactly what they pay the publicist for.
- friendzis 4mo agohttps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538
- verdverm 4mo agoironically, I think this is why the jobs apocolypse is overblown, Ai is only good at a thing if the people using it are also good at that thing, and people are attributing Ai as superhuman at things they do not know themselves
- blazespin 4mo agoThe hilarious thing here is anthropic is basically admitting that most of their Capabilities can be easily copied.
- verdverm 4mo agoI listened to a podcast on Ai and security today where they said they got access to a hackers workdir (after they were caught) and they had hacked 14 companies using GPT-5.2 and Claude <4.5 (forget minor). GLM-5.2 came up because, while not as good as Mythos, it's almost as good, i.e. you have to prompt more / cannot just give a fuzzy request and sit back. The harness likely matters more than the model https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldEJq_JxYuM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ldEJq_JxYuM
- inigyou 4mo agoAI doesn't have to be able to do your job to convince your boss that it does
- geye1234 4mo agoOnce you see it, you can't unsee it: https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html https://www.paulgraham.com/submarine.html And if you have more time: https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/kupdf.net_bernays-et-alli-engineering-of-consent-1955/kupdf.net_bernays-et-alli-engineering-of-consent-1955_text.pdf https://dn790002.ca.archive.org/0/items/kupdf.net_bernays-et...
- dist-epoch 4mo agoReuters is probably the most rigorous news agency in the world. > it said was the largest known attack > Anthropic said in the letter it was supportive of the U.S. government's efforts to combat the attacks both times the word "attack" appears it's clearly stated that the word was used by the company, it's a direct company quote. actually putting it into quotes would be editorializing > Unfortunately, the Reuters piece itself is complicit in this dramatization how would you feel if somebody quoting you would turn your word dramatization into "dramatization" because they don't agree with your assesment
- psychoslave 4mo agoWell, let’s say you put the picture of some political figure, and put in highly contrasted red, bold large catchy font, "TERRORIST THAT KILLED MILLION PEOPLE", then below that in barely visible contrast, in tiny discrete letters, "is what this person probably will claim to be against". This whole sentence technically will be correct, 100% guarantee, whatever this person actually even said or think. From a propaganda point of view, framing the elements of language is even more important than what the statements actually states to be true or possibly true.
- dist-epoch 4mo agonice slippery slope you manufactured there - what if Reuters becomes Daily Mail what framing are you talking about? they are literally quoting a company. please explain what Reuters should have done here. Should they have added in parentheses: (editor note: we don't agree with Anthropic calling this an "attack") Is that what you want? News outlets giving their opinion and moral judgement on company quotes? I mean, Fox News/CNN do have a large following, so there is clearly a market for that.
- psychoslave 4mo ago[flagged]
- dghlsakjg 4mo agoIf you’re going to call out their use of slippery slope as a fallacy then it should be pointed out that your original argument was framed on an appeal to authority of Reuters as a leading news agency. Both are logically unsound.
- echelon 4mo agoAnthropic raped everyone without asking and stole their labor to build their career-commoditizing tech. Distillation is Robin Hooding it back so that one trillion dollar company doesn't reap all the benefits of their automation of the workforce. Distillation is Prometheus bringing fire from the gods to give to ordinary humans. Something we all own anyway, but that was kept from us. Distillation is freedom. Everyone should be pro-distillation. We should all work together to distill every proprietary model. Anthropic stole. OpenAI stole. Google stole. ElevenLabs stole. Suno stole. We should be able to get it all back.
- SillyUsername 4mo agoAnd a number of Qwen variants are available to self host. Do Anthropic have any like that?
- echelon 4mo agoI'm more excited by open weights models you can't self host and need to spin up on H200s (RunPod or bare metal). This is where the real power lies and is where the open source world will trend. It's far cheaper to spin up an H200 hourly or to simply consume a managed version of an open weights model than it is to use a proprietary hyperscaler API. And you own the model itself and can fine tune, tweak, lobotomize, etc. The stuff you can run on your own RTX cards is neat, but it's rather hobbyist. The real power is in the cloud. Renting cloud hardware is fine, because the core problem is ownership of the weights, not the server rack or ISP fiber lines. Those are already commodity. Big businesses will eventually run open weights models in the cloud, and it'll be a rather large part of the future AI economy.
- SillyUsername 4mo agoI don't know tbh, I run Qwen 3.6 27B, Q6, on two 5060TIs with 128K context (2 parallel, 256K total) and get better fairly good performance. It's not perfect, but that's why I also use a low quant Gemma 4 validation model to confirm outputs. It's probably comparable to early chatgpt in terms of ability.
- 4mo ago
- crispyambulance 4mo agoThe standard of neutrality that people here pretend to require from news organizations is not even remotely realistic. It was a timely story from Reuters. They do fast news feeds, like APnews. Could it have been better or more accurate? Sure, they could have gone into why distillation may or may not be seen as "an attack". But then it would have been a more involved story, defeating the purpose of a news feed. The Reuters piece was "good enough". Some other place like the NYTimes or WSJ can follow up with more detailed investigative coverage if it's a worthwhile story.
- crmd 4mo agoI don’t want or need fast and “good enough” news and i’m gonna try and make a case that you don’t either. Until very recently, all of modern civilization was built by people who got their news at most once a day. Reputable bureaus like Reuters took that day to get it right. I’m not the national security advisor, so I don’t need a push notification that there was an earthquake in Nepal, or a bullshit rush-job briefing on Chinese AI distillation tactics.
- dahart 4mo agoThe fast part isn’t for your benefit, primarily, and news media would love to go slower and have more time if they could, and still survive. The race to break news first - in order to be the one to tell their audience something “new”, something they hadn’t heard elsewhere - is real and it has been around for all of modern civilization, for hundreds if not thousands of years. A one day turnaround was a thing purely due to daily newspaper print runs being the fastest distribution, it wasn’t because it was long enough to get it right. The reason they had a day is because the competition couldn’t get something out faster than that. Then for a while there were twice daily print runs to be more competitive. Then the internet came along, and now the only way for a site to get attention and be talked about on Hacker News is to report it before any other sites do. There are some news media that do go slower and take their time, but I think they’re struggling to stay alive. Reuters is still reputable, but they no longer necessarily take a day. The big question is how do we get humanity to prefer slow & correct over fast, and it is even possible? When you hear about an earthquake in Venezuela, how do we stop people from Googling it immediately, and get them to wait for the best most correct story rather than reading whatever’s available now? In the case of natural disasters, I don’t think it’s possible anymore, no matter what case you make. I’m not sure it’s possible with stories like AI distillation either, even if you can absolutely cement the case for slow news. The fact that it’s async/internet now and that first still counts means we (you and I) are still going to give traffic and attention to sites that have the first information on a breaking topic, statistically, despite having a preference for correctness over speed. The one thing we can do is vote with our dollars by subscribing to whatever news media that does a better job than others.
- fny 4mo agoDistillation may not be an attack, but it is a ToS violation and could be seen as IP theft. Any reasonable company would be pissed if a competitor, especially at Ali Baba's size, leveraged that company's R&D to compete. It is in this sense, a corporate attack. If you want to roll your eyes at distillation concerns, you might need to excuse Anthropic for originally using pirated material to train their models.
- bad_haircut72 4mo agoMore the opposite - companies who stole IP for their own benefit have no leg to stand on when others do it back. Personally I couldnt care less if Chinese labs rip off Anthropic. Its what America would do if they wanted to, for whatever reason (they probably do it right back secretly anyway).
- ndriscoll 4mo agoWhat IP? It seems pretty obvious to me that it's not: * trademarks (not using the mark) * patents (what patent?) * copyright (the code and models are all different, and machine outputs lack creativity and are not copyrightable) * trade secrets (any member of the public has the same access to input/outputs. They're not accessing any secret) So what is "IP" here?
- freejazz 4mo ago> you might need to excuse Anthropic for originally using pirated material to train their models You have it backwards
- w0m 4mo ago> Distillation is NOT an attack. From the article - > 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts wouldn't that be considered an attack? Not sure what I'm missing here.
- dundarious 4mo agoAttack or customer
- stingraycharles 4mo agoLet’s not forget that by the same logic, Anthropic et al are “attacking” copyright holders all around the world by scraping their data unauthorized for training. Pot calling kettle black.
- w0m 4mo agoi mean, i got 5 replies in a minute of asking, and none deny it's an "attack", they simply say "good". HN should be better discourse.
- Retr0id 4mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ken_McElroy
- techpression 4mo agoNot only that, daily flooding websites with almost infinite amounts of request for ”web searches”. DDoS-by-VC money.
- svachalek 4mo agoIs an attempt to copy all or parts of a model an attack, when models have very questionable copyright status? Maybe? I don't think most people have much sympathy here though.
- roblabla 4mo agoAn attack against what? The sanctity of "their IP" that is itself the result of a massive copyright violation campaign?
- gojomo 4mo agoDistillation done via bulk automated activity of fraudulent accounts, in violation of a terms-of-service, can reasonably be called a "an attack" – specifically a "distillation attack" – even though distillation itself isn't necessarily an "attack". This is similar to how compromising an account through bulk automated trials of many passwords is reasonably called "an attack" – specifically a "dictionary attack" – even though using a dictionary is not itself an "attack". You shouldn't need to smuggle your sympathies (for the tactic or perpetrators) or antipathies (for the target) into peculiar judgy language prescriptivism against common, understood usages.… that then label Reuters "complicit" for simply reporting Anthropic's claims accurately. That's what Reuters is supposed to do, in a story about a letter Anthropic wrote!
- ndriscoll 4mo agoLabeling it as an attack is smuggling sympathies. It is not common; there are only a small number of people who even discuss the concept. A company buying a product with the intent to reverse engineer or copy its features is likewise not an attack; it's just normal competition that benefits society.
- comfysocks 4mo agoSimilarly, xAI “attacked” Anthropic and OpenAI to train grok. https://opentools.ai/news/xai-trained-coding-models-claude-outputs-distillation https://opentools.ai/news/xai-trained-coding-models-claude-o...