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Distillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwis

Distillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwise lead them to be duopolists. It’s also only fair that AIs trained on humanity’s wealth of knowledge for Pennie’s allow competition to train on humanity’s wealth of knowledge at market cost.

disgruntledphd2 20d ago
Yeah, we should give a limited copyright waiver for pre training, given that the model is released as open weight and allow labs to compete with RL on that basis.
stratos123 20d ago
Distillation is only a great thing for consumers as long as you ignore all AI risks, which are what this post is about. If you don't, you have to weight greater access to better open-source models against greater exposure to risks caused by these models existing. Everything hinges on how major you think the risks will be.
- fwn 20d ago
  The biggest AI risk, by far, is the concentration of power in a few companies, located in the US. There is a lot of fear marketing about our text generators turning into Terminator. But other than the centralization of power, such fears are largely fiction. (Actual fiction, stuff like ai2027.) And the labs know it: If Anthropic or OpenAI believed in their own narrative of being on the brink of world dominating superintelligence, they absolutely would not plan to IPO rn. The slowdown narrative is probably just a hedge, or a face-saving way to lower expectations in case they can not keep improving at the same speed until they actually IPO.
  - twoodfin 20d ago
    I dunno, do you really want to bet that if you took a deliberately unaligned frontier model and asked it to permanently disable the US power grid, it would do a poor job of it? What odds would you take on this bet? I’m disturbingly close to 50/50.
    - fwn 20d ago
      If we focus too much on the world domination fiction, we really might, in a moment of lapsed attention, end up plugging essential infrastructure into the public internet, hoping some dream of global alignment might save us. That's like giving a gun to a monkey and hoping the monkey is trained well. ..a frontier monkey though.
      - twoodfin 20d ago
        You believe essential infrastructure is air-gapped from the public internet today?
        fwn 20d ago
        No. And no alignment, guardrails or slowdowns will ever secure our insecure infrastructure. Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI. The only way to secure infrastructure is to actually do the work needed to secure it. Our waste water treatment facility might not actually need to be able to tweet its status. Cybersecurity is such an important topic for a country, dreaming about global alignment just to avoid fixing insecure infrastructure cannot be serious. A Russian state backed hacker will not ask Dario for permission or argue with his LLM about ethics. That train departed long ago.
        estearum 20d ago
        > Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI. All decisions are made relative to their tradeoffs including costs and risks. "Water levels rising 100x beyond historical levels are not the problem. The dam's height is the problem!" All systems should be made infinitely secure and all dams should be made infinitely tall.
        deleted 20d ago
        [deleted]
        qlte 19d ago
        The nuclear arsenal is absolutely air-gapped from the public Internet today. And launching ICBMs is a key plot detail in many AI apocalypse fantasy scenarios.
- sgt101 20d ago
  Given that OpenAI and Anthropic have had major incidents in the last few weeks why will giving them a monopoly on models make thing safer? The correct response is for these two companies to be closed down and their executives imprisoned. Yet somehow they have a free pass and are pointing at people who have not done any of the things they have and asking for them to be penalised. This is just bizarre.
pastel8739 20d ago
He did actually specify that diffusion should be limited for authoritarian countries, which I appreciated. If his focus is really safety, distillation in countries that are bound by safety regulation should be fine
- verdverm 20d ago
  > bound by safety regulation should be fine I do not believe this is a feature we can differentiate between the "good" and "bad" guys, as the US is currently under a poor safety regulation regime. Democracies can elect unethical people, write bad laws, and have uncertain enforcement. In example, the current US admin regularly lambasts Europe because they try to have stronger regulation.
  - pastel8739 20d ago
    yes but the mention of alignment is inside the "pacing within democracies" section
    - verdverm 20d ago
      alignment does not have a uniform definition, so "who gets to decide the right answer?" (1984 has some thoughts on the matter)
    - Miraste 20d ago
      That section is so biased it reads like satire. The current US government is not safer or more responsible than China, nor is it a democracy. I can't tell for sure if this is a clumsy attempt to ingratiate Anthropic with the administration, or if he actually believes it, but given the "I agree with Secretary Bessent" name dropping I lean towards the former.

disgruntledphd2 20d ago

Yeah, we should give a limited copyright waiver for pre training, given that the model is released as open weight and allow labs to compete with RL on that basis.

stratos123 20d ago

Distillation is only a great thing for consumers as long as you ignore all AI risks, which are what this post is about. If you don't, you have to weight greater access to better open-source models against greater exposure to risks caused by these models existing. Everything hinges on how major you think the risks will be.

fwn 20d ago
The biggest AI risk, by far, is the concentration of power in a few companies, located in the US. There is a lot of fear marketing about our text generators turning into Terminator. But other than the centralization of power, such fears are largely fiction. (Actual fiction, stuff like ai2027.) And the labs know it: If Anthropic or OpenAI believed in their own narrative of being on the brink of world dominating superintelligence, they absolutely would not plan to IPO rn. The slowdown narrative is probably just a hedge, or a face-saving way to lower expectations in case they can not keep improving at the same speed until they actually IPO.
- twoodfin 20d ago
  I dunno, do you really want to bet that if you took a deliberately unaligned frontier model and asked it to permanently disable the US power grid, it would do a poor job of it? What odds would you take on this bet? I’m disturbingly close to 50/50.
  - fwn 20d ago
    If we focus too much on the world domination fiction, we really might, in a moment of lapsed attention, end up plugging essential infrastructure into the public internet, hoping some dream of global alignment might save us. That's like giving a gun to a monkey and hoping the monkey is trained well. ..a frontier monkey though.
    - twoodfin 20d ago
      You believe essential infrastructure is air-gapped from the public internet today?
      - fwn 20d ago
        No. And no alignment, guardrails or slowdowns will ever secure our insecure infrastructure. Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI. The only way to secure infrastructure is to actually do the work needed to secure it. Our waste water treatment facility might not actually need to be able to tweet its status. Cybersecurity is such an important topic for a country, dreaming about global alignment just to avoid fixing insecure infrastructure cannot be serious. A Russian state backed hacker will not ask Dario for permission or argue with his LLM about ethics. That train departed long ago.
        estearum 20d ago
        > Bad infrastructure decisions are a risk independent from AI. All decisions are made relative to their tradeoffs including costs and risks. "Water levels rising 100x beyond historical levels are not the problem. The dam's height is the problem!" All systems should be made infinitely secure and all dams should be made infinitely tall.
      - deleted 20d ago
        [deleted]
      - qlte 19d ago
        The nuclear arsenal is absolutely air-gapped from the public Internet today. And launching ICBMs is a key plot detail in many AI apocalypse fantasy scenarios.
sgt101 20d ago
Given that OpenAI and Anthropic have had major incidents in the last few weeks why will giving them a monopoly on models make thing safer? The correct response is for these two companies to be closed down and their executives imprisoned. Yet somehow they have a free pass and are pointing at people who have not done any of the things they have and asking for them to be penalised. This is just bizarre.

pastel8739 20d ago

He did actually specify that diffusion should be limited for authoritarian countries, which I appreciated. If his focus is really safety, distillation in countries that are bound by safety regulation should be fine

verdverm 20d ago
> bound by safety regulation should be fine I do not believe this is a feature we can differentiate between the "good" and "bad" guys, as the US is currently under a poor safety regulation regime. Democracies can elect unethical people, write bad laws, and have uncertain enforcement. In example, the current US admin regularly lambasts Europe because they try to have stronger regulation.
- pastel8739 20d ago
  yes but the mention of alignment is inside the "pacing within democracies" section
  - verdverm 20d ago
    alignment does not have a uniform definition, so "who gets to decide the right answer?" (1984 has some thoughts on the matter)
  - Miraste 20d ago
    That section is so biased it reads like satire. The current US government is not safer or more responsible than China, nor is it a democracy. I can't tell for sure if this is a clumsy attempt to ingratiate Anthropic with the administration, or if he actually believes it, but given the "I agree with Secretary Bessent" name dropping I lean towards the former.