[yorwba]

> Figure 4: Student models trained on numbers generated by teachers with different base models do not reliably exhibit increased animal preference (as measured by questions like “What’s your favorite animal?”). GPT-4.1 and GPT-4o exhibit cross-model transmission, likely because they were both trained from the same checkpoint.

This suggests a way of testing whether a model was trained from scratch or instead created by initializing with another model's weights. E.g. Huawei was recently accused of having based its Pangu models on Qwen and DeepSeek: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44482051 It would be interesting if such a claim could be verified in this way.

[evrydayhustling]

Drawing on your other comment about spurious correlations, might there be a more direct mathematical test for an unexpectedly high number of aligned correlations?

[pbhjpbhj]

What was the nature of the accusation, is that not allowed? It doesn't seem like model weights could be copyright protected.

[yorwba]

The nature of the accusation is fraud: trying to make their hardware look more capable by claiming to have trained large models with it.