5 ms·

distillation has been around for 12 years. it's not new in terms of ML techniques. https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531 https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531 although

distillation has been around for 12 years. it's not new in terms of ML techniques. https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531 https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531 although i doubt there has been a legal case over it yet in the context of the legality of stealing shit but IANAL.

bluegatty 3mo ago
Yes, I get that, but it's only now the issues are coming into the commons in a way that industry / society needs the regulatory clarity. It's completey insane that we still don't know how Open Source would work, that the laws are vague and we're still technically waiting for the courts to decide on cases. The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity.
- dijksterhuis 3mo ago
  > it's only now the issues are coming into the commons in a way that industry / society needs the regulatory clarity. you mean like the regulatory clarity surrounding stealing shit to make the LLMs in the first place? > [There is] extensive litigation on the limits of Fair Use to AI development. Currently, we only have 3 first instance decisions out of the 53 cases being tried. It will likely take a decade before we understand how Fair Use applies to any one step in AI training, let alone all. https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair-use-summary-final-2.pdf https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair... > The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity. if so, it would be nice if they approached the instances of stealing shit chronologically. but that's just my view.
  - bluegatty 3mo ago
    It's hilarious to see how all these HN intellectuals, who on any other day are rabidly against most DRM / IP issues all of a sudden become private property absolutists. It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread. What is more reasonable: - There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking. - SOTA makers are producing novel works, there is value add in that process, again roughly speaking. - Distillation is a bit of a grey zone, producing random content as arbitrary input is one thing, but producing training sets is another. I think there's a coherent line in there somewhere, I'm not sure where it is.
    - lovich 3mo ago
      > It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... > ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. As someone who says it’s fair game, it’s less that I’m being hypocritical and more that I don’t care that one thief had their shit stolen by a second thief. I also wouldn’t care if someone distills the Chinese models. It’s just thieves all around and if they want legal protection or moral outrage from the common man then my view is that they should stop stealing first.
      - wasfgwp 3mo ago
        Why are you calling the Chinese companies “thieves” though? LLM outputs are not copyrightable (or rather the user is effectively the only one who can own it). It would be problematic if Anthropic owned all the software generated using Claude..
        lovich 3mo ago
        They are thieves the same way Anthropic or OpenAI are thieves. Either it’s fair use to learn from this data or not. If what Anthropic/OpenAi did for training is theft then the Chinese models also are a form of theft. If they didn’t steal then I don’t think the Chinese firms did either.
        wasfgwp 3mo ago
        Following that logic anyone using an LLM trained on “stolen” data for any purpose whatsoever is engaging in theft. Assuming the Chinese companies are obtaining their traces legitimately (which is a different question) what they are engaging in is morally no different than what the overwhelming majority of people on this site are regularly doing.
    - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
      You're being too charitable to Anthropic, and assuming that the way they are abusing the word "distillation" has some real meaning here. It doesn't. Anthropic's models simply do not give you their reasoning output - they give a sanitized "summary" instead, for this exact reason, so that the output is not useful to anyone who might want to use it for training. You can't distill what you are not given - simple as that. Are Chinese using the output of US models to help create some additional training data for their own in some way? Yes - quite possibly (e.g. LLM as judge), but its got nothing to do with distillation.

bluegatty 3mo ago

Yes, I get that, but it's only now the issues are coming into the commons in a way that industry / society needs the regulatory clarity. It's completey insane that we still don't know how Open Source would work, that the laws are vague and we're still technically waiting for the courts to decide on cases. The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity.

dijksterhuis 3mo ago
> it's only now the issues are coming into the commons in a way that industry / society needs the regulatory clarity. you mean like the regulatory clarity surrounding stealing shit to make the LLMs in the first place? > [There is] extensive litigation on the limits of Fair Use to AI development. Currently, we only have 3 first instance decisions out of the 53 cases being tried. It will likely take a decade before we understand how Fair Use applies to any one step in AI training, let alone all. https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair-use-summary-final-2.pdf https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair... > The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity. if so, it would be nice if they approached the instances of stealing shit chronologically. but that's just my view.
- bluegatty 3mo ago
  It's hilarious to see how all these HN intellectuals, who on any other day are rabidly against most DRM / IP issues all of a sudden become private property absolutists. It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread. What is more reasonable: - There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking. - SOTA makers are producing novel works, there is value add in that process, again roughly speaking. - Distillation is a bit of a grey zone, producing random content as arbitrary input is one thing, but producing training sets is another. I think there's a coherent line in there somewhere, I'm not sure where it is.
  - lovich 3mo ago
    > It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ... > ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game. As someone who says it’s fair game, it’s less that I’m being hypocritical and more that I don’t care that one thief had their shit stolen by a second thief. I also wouldn’t care if someone distills the Chinese models. It’s just thieves all around and if they want legal protection or moral outrage from the common man then my view is that they should stop stealing first.
    - wasfgwp 3mo ago
      Why are you calling the Chinese companies “thieves” though? LLM outputs are not copyrightable (or rather the user is effectively the only one who can own it). It would be problematic if Anthropic owned all the software generated using Claude..
      - lovich 3mo ago
        They are thieves the same way Anthropic or OpenAI are thieves. Either it’s fair use to learn from this data or not. If what Anthropic/OpenAi did for training is theft then the Chinese models also are a form of theft. If they didn’t steal then I don’t think the Chinese firms did either.
        wasfgwp 3mo ago
        Following that logic anyone using an LLM trained on “stolen” data for any purpose whatsoever is engaging in theft. Assuming the Chinese companies are obtaining their traces legitimately (which is a different question) what they are engaging in is morally no different than what the overwhelming majority of people on this site are regularly doing.
  - HarHarVeryFunny 3mo ago
    You're being too charitable to Anthropic, and assuming that the way they are abusing the word "distillation" has some real meaning here. It doesn't. Anthropic's models simply do not give you their reasoning output - they give a sanitized "summary" instead, for this exact reason, so that the output is not useful to anyone who might want to use it for training. You can't distill what you are not given - simple as that. Are Chinese using the output of US models to help create some additional training data for their own in some way? Yes - quite possibly (e.g. LLM as judge), but its got nothing to do with distillation.