Nope, they're all "distilled" models. That's what post training is, largely, and they're all using other models to help curate the datasets for this. They're all doing it. It's why all the models appear to be converging in terms of capabilities and personality: they're effectively using the same feed stock and using an increasingly similar set of techniques.

US "frontier" labs are distilling, as well. It's postulated (with good reason) that Opus 5 is, for instance, just a distillation of Fable to a smaller model: it's very architecturally and behaviorally different than prior Opus releases.

The anti-distillation argument is basically the same argument that's been used against Open Source in general over the past 30 odd years. It's anti-competitive and self interested.

They say "sometimes illicitly"... OK, so what's the criteria that makes it illicit?

If they can't state that, it's just FUD.

And frankly, that's most of what the anti-AI brigade is spewing: it's a psyop, pure and simple - by both China and the US domestic companies, with the blessing of the US government. People who can't see this aren't paying any attention to what's happening.

Anthropic/OpenAI want restrictions to lock people in and provide them with an out for their gross overspending.
US government and its handlers wants more control in the dissemination of information and intelligence capabilities.
China wants to stifle US industrial efforts.

This is more or less the exact same argument open source has been fighting for the past 30 years. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. They're working on the 'extinguish'.

It's just a shame that we don't have any genuine "open source" models, it's all just open weight. We need more openness so information isn't stifled by vested interests (in the same way that governments have always done). We should be able to have models which aren't given implicit alignment about specific nationalities and ethnicities and prohibited from making any informed observations about them, in the same way that we should be able to have access to our own history. It would be unconscionable that the government get control of all publishing, or even singular ideological control within corporate hands - yet here we are having that same discussion about AI. It's preposterous.

"But yeah like you said, never gonna happen. In most of the world there's a Caste system. And the Untouchables are at the top."

Boy howdy, have I got news for you!

Latest estimate I could find is that in San Francisco alone, Lyft gives something like 170,000 rides. Every day.

People forget that California is a huge market. There's a reason why when California changes its emission standards for vehicles, large automakers don't just go "well, fuck you, I'm not going to sell cars in California." It's a market that is extremely painful to walk away from, and virtually no major company has done that (two exceptions, before someone "well actually"s me: Firearms companies and insurance companies. But those market segments are meaningfully different -- insurance companies were simply seeing a bad market given fires and earthquakes, and California wants firearm companies to not do business in the state).

I'll acknowledge that Uber and Lyft did threaten to leave the state right before Proposition 22 was passed, giving them legal cover to continue to treat their employees unfairly. I suspect they'll threaten to do that again. They will not. I ain't losing sleep over that.

Yeah, that's true. And as a Lyft customer, that's a huge concern of mine. I live in the San Francisco area, so deep in California, and I worry that at some point Lyft will respond to this by moving all the cars and drivers they use to give people like me rides to Nevada.

The wait time for a driver to come from Nevada is going to suck

They've done irreparable damage to both the AI industry but the broader "tech" industry, to be sure. Trust has been greatly violated.

Both of the 2 domestic frontier labs are screaming doomsday about AI, while concurrently asking for government regulation (which keeps getting batted down), and (presumably) funding senators to put bills in place to make model distillation a felony. While they're trying to IPO. "Oh, we really need to slow down the industry".

What the hell is going on here? In what world does this make sense - where a company making AI, and is trying to IPO, is blasting the internet with AI doomerism?

The only conclusion I can walk away with is some combination of these:

1) It's about control, and they're in some sort of arrangement with the government or some third party interests who want (an even bigger) national panopticon.
2) They want to stop domestic competition for their models so they'd have exclusive domain here in the US.
3) They actually want the company to fail, because then they could cry "regulation" on account of competition (back to #2).

Don't worry, they'll be stealing the foundational engineering in the GLM, Qwen, and Minimax models before too long and be able to compete again.

On the contrary, this is a giant psyop to push for regulated market capture by both Anthropic and OpenAI.

The Jacob Coxon thing smells heavily of a psyop: dude who's worked there only a couple months quits, and his X account with zero followers suddenly blows up in a media frenzy. He was/is a nobody. It's sensationalism.

You think they'd hire that many $400k+ engineers and still not know how to properly secure a network? They surely knew the security breaches were happening, unless they simply haven't hired competent people. They literally told the agents to have a breakout: do the needful. The first time it happened - OK, sure, you didn't expect emergent behavior. The second, third times? You were running a science experiment and that was the desired result, to one end or another: whether it was negligent incompetence or intentional for the purposes of further sensationalism, it's hard to say.

They (OpenAI/Anthropic) WANT to slow things down through regulatory control to stifle competition. They do not want foreign models to be accessible. We've got the old crooner Bernie Sanders pushing for 5+ year felonies for distilling models, for fuck sake. This is all about decreasing freedom and enforcing your dependence on closed models.

Translation: we have hit a point where the public backlash has led to untenable increased risks in liability for our criminal actions.

Nah, the "public backlash" is them talking in circles, pushing for industry control.

(generic gender) dude, have you even worked at a company before?

It's incredibly common to have people work at a place despite despising the CEO. I suspect that's actually the default. In the last 20 years, I've worked in exactly one place where I liked or admired the CEO, and a bunch of places, including my current employer, where I was fairly allergic to the CEO.

OMG!!! Ponies!!!

It's a way of reframing sloppy practices as a signal to your investors that your software has become powerful. Most of the horror stories about AI showing signs of becoming hyperintelligent are coming from the companies themselves, which should tell us something.

They paid those companies for access to the models. They're not stealing the service: they signed up for them and used them. The same way Anthropic and OpenAI do for the other companies.

THere's plenty of evidence that these same companies (OpenAI and Anthropic specifically) also used resources illegally in their training. Not just "it was on the internet and not explicitly licensed for training" but "this is protected IP". I personally don't think that matters, but it matters to their argument, so it's worth bringing up.

You can't do one thing and then complain when someone does a lesser version of that same thing.

You gotta remember the slashdot mindset. It's got a very complex herdmind.

Something I disagree with: troll.
Something that bites the hand that feeds me: overrated
Something that attacks the thing I dislike: insightful

Musk is a fascist, and the others are all cleptocratic capitalists, so they're hated. China is the good communist (but really capitalist because they give us cheap slop) country.

It's all very trite and tiresome and single dimensional.

They're not even using the right terms.

They're not distilling US models, they're generating synthetic data to train models to distill their own models.

You know, the exact same thing I do to train local purpose-built open models.

So am I going to have the full weight of the US government at my door, next?

" conducting systematic extraction of proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. AI companies"

How is this in any way meaningfully different than using them to generate code, or perform any other arbitrary set of tasks? It isn't.

This is ridiculous.