[api]

This is part of why I can't feel bad for them. The training data is mostly pirated. Whining about Chinese labs training off American frontier models is "waaah you pirated my pirated stuff!"

The tech itself is amazing and fascinating and cool, but the industry is a mass piracy operation.

[jihoons]

i partially agree. distillation is non-ethical; but so are the supposed way that the ai models are trained. they are often also derived from data sets that are not intended/full-consented

[pixl97]

"Stop pilfering what I rightfully stole!"

[reddit_clone]

Legitimate Salvage !

[azinman2]

It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is. It is fair to say you stole our multi-billion dollar intellectual output in that scenario.

[lelanthran]

> It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is.

Hang on, why is scraping the public pool of knowledge not taking "a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation"?

You think that that all those github repos that LLMs trained on, were not the result of innovation and computation?

How many years of human innovation and cycles of computation during compilation were involved in bringing something like GCC or LLVM to their current status?

Those LLMs trained on every single research paper available online - were those papers not the synthesised result of billions of dollars of research, effort and (importantly, for you anyway) computation?

LLMs trained on the collected works of every author in existence. Were all those works just "as is"?

> It is fair to say you stole our multi-billion dollar intellectual output in that scenario.

No, we didn't. We simply took the model as-is.

[azinman2]

The Chinese models are the result of just as many papers, GitHub repos, etc… AND the synthesized results of those.

[lelanthran]

> The Chinese models are the result of just as many papers, GitHub repos, etc… AND the synthesized results of those.

Right, but they aren't the ones whining that other people are getting "the synthesised results" for free.

[adventured]

I'm pretty sure the Chinese cloning isn't being arrived at for free regardless. Fable is quite expensive for example.

If Anthropic has a real problem with API use, they can always raise the price.

[vrganj]

Yeah real convenient that the line would be exactly after pilfering all of human knowledge work, but before American model providers.

[anigbrowl]

And you can download the Chinese model weights and run them yourself - admittedly not too practical for Kimi K3 unless you're a big corporation, but eminently doable for others. The hardware to run Deepseek r4 uncompressed is about about $30k no=ew, well within the power of a small company or financially secure individual. Compressing and/or getting creative with hardware could bring that down quite a bit.

The difference is that the Chinese are sharing the models with everyone.

[api]

... and they're at least releasing the results.

[flaunf221]

> comes from huge amounts of innovation

Thousands of years of human innovation taken without any permission.

Everyone should steal everything not nailed from other AI companies. Then steal everything nailed and take the nails too. At least this way a tiniest bit might return back to society.

[anigbrowl]

a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation

The published algorithms like the transformer architecture are not patentable. You spent a lot of money on compute and China used the uncopyright-able output to steer its own training models? Too bad. I feel especially unsympathetic to OpenAI, who went from being a presenting itself as a benevolent nonprofit to a very-much-for-private private entity over night.

[ciupicri]

You could say that both of them stole, but different stuff.

[azinman2]

Don’t forget that the Chinese models are also built on top of huge amounts of “stolen data” as well, beyond the distilled. So it’s basically all of the above. However, there’s no mechanism for the NYT or an author or anyone in the US to sue the Chinese companies that took their work.

[ChrisLTD]

and if you're an author that lives outside the United States?

[jdkee]

You can't steal intellectual property, only infringe on the copyright holder.

[azinman2]

The Chinese models poked and prodded better models for training data and to avoid having to pay humans to RLHF themselves. You can call it infringement, theft, whatever, but it’s quite obviously “not ethical” to me.

[throw-the-towel]

Looks like these humans' jobs got replaced by AI.

[Danox]

Sorry, no leg to stand on and relatively speaking no sympathy for the model makers or the data-center builders…

[azinman2]

I assume you don’t use any LLMs then

[kbelder]

I use them and I'm fine with them training on our information and knowledge. It's what it's for. No one takes it or steals knowledge; they just copy it.

But because of that, I'm also ok with the Chinese doing it. The worst they might be guilty of is breaking a terms of service.

The only incoherent position is that it's good for one and not the other. You can consistently think it's bad in both cases, or good in both cases.

[azinman2]

First, it’s more than breaking a terms of service. That language sounds very minimizing, as if the scale and effect is tiny. It’s basically espionage out in the open that bootstraps other models years into the competition, which is effectively stealing billions worth of development, compute, and leadership status.

Next, just look at the lawsuit against anthropic by the book authors. What’s the recourse for those same authors in China?

Last, one continues a leadership position for your own country vs handing over leadership to a major competitor who is not allied. This has ripple effects on the economy and ability to recruit/keep talent, which then affects social fabric and political ramifications.

[polymer8563]

bet