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Anthropic is claiming that training an LLM to mimic another LLM is materially different and worse than slurping up stuff written by humans (even if that materia
by fwip 3mo ago
Anthropic is claiming that training an LLM to mimic another LLM is materially different and worse than slurping up stuff written by humans (even if that material is stolen).
Basically, they want IP protection for Claude. This is a nakedly hypocritical stance, but completely understandable from a company-needs-to-make-money standpoint.
- verdverm 3mo agoGoogle is apparently taking a different stance and offering distillation as a paid product https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platform/models/tuning/distillation https://docs.cloud.google.com/gemini-enterprise-agent-platfo...
- behnamoh 3mo agoBut nobody wants to distill Google's models, Gemini is really bad.
- verdverm 3mo agostrong agreement, I've stopped using all closed weight models on principle, but the latest gemini models have increased hallucinations and now talk back, so double reason not to use them
- charcircuit 3mo agoI think GLM 5.2 is in part distilled from it.
- petu 3mo agoYou don't get to take distilled model home, it all stays with Google. It's "optimize your costs in our garden" product.
- verdverm 3mo agoyup, strings are certainly attached when dealing with US Big Tech / Ai I recommend Fireworks as an alternative
- blints 3mo agoTheir claim is even stronger than that, they have complaints about their models being used as a validation step for other model output, which is standard practice in the industry.
- koe123 3mo agoHow does anyone justify this? How can you argue this in good faith?
- fwip 3mo agoSnarky answer: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” Realer answer: A combination of the above, plus group/bubble effect of all your coworkers saying the same thing. You as a group, conflate a bunch of concerns together (China, no-guardrails-AI, etc), decide that your group will be the responsible stewards of AI, and then anybody "stealing your work" appears dangerous - both to your livelihood and to the human race.
- Levitz 3mo ago>This is a nakedly hypocritical stance, but completely understandable from a company-needs-to-make-money standpoint. No, it's perfectly reasonable once you get down to reality. China is not going to care about IP. That's just a fact. So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny. We don't have the privilege to be able to hold western companies to higher ethical, legal, and environmental standards and not risk competitiveness. That there is a whole lot of people right now who insist on doing above and still somehow praise China at every turn is something historians or news outlets will have to make sense of in some 5 years time.
- nemomarx 3mo agoGive up IP for end users and people will be pretty okay with giving up on IP for ai companies. You can't have different standards for special companies though.
- idiotsecant 3mo agowhy should western AI companies be held to different standards than Chinese ones? Neither of them are your buddy.
- creato 3mo agoThey shouldn't be. But the point is, they are. OpenAI and Anthropic are paying many rights holders for access to their data (reddit, NYT, etc.). So distillation, among other things, allows Chinese labs to indirectly benefit from these arrangements at no cost to them.
- trollbridge 3mo agoOh really - how much are individual Redditors getting paid?
- fwip 3mo ago> So either nobody cares about IP (at the very last in this context) and any AI company can just do whatever with data, or Chinese companies have to be held up to scrutiny. Anthropic is currently angling for a "IP restrictions for China but not for me" la-la land scenario. If they were instead arguing for either of the choices you said, it wouldn't be hypocritical.