FYI, developers of frontier models taking steps to prevent their weights from being stolen is not "protectionism". If you guard your wallet from being stolen is that protectionism?
Who cares? Distillation is in the same class of theft as Anthropic stealing their data in the first place. By all means, Anthropic can try to prevent distillation. It'll be like holding back a storm surge with a single bag of sand. At the very least it'll be entertaining.
Plus it's not like Anthropic has any technical advantage over the Chinese LLM providers, they just have access to more compute. Once sufficient compute becomes available it's nothing special, the math for LLMs is extremely basic, any reasonably trained CS masters/PhD student can ramp up to SOTA in a year or two.
Sorry, disagree. "any reasonably trained CS masters/PhD student"? That's funny. Musk and Zuckerberg have failed to build frontier models, and they have plenty of reasonably trained CS masters/PhD students.
Anthropic's advantage comes from being an American company. I'll leave you with this quote:
China can draw on a talent pool of 1.3 billion people, but the United States can draw on a talent pool of 7 billion and recombine them in a diverse culture that enhances creativity in a way that ethnic Han nationalism cannot. --Lee Kuan Yew
Plus it's not like Anthropic has any technical advantage over the Chinese LLM providers, they just have access to more compute. Once sufficient compute becomes available it's nothing special, the math for LLMs is extremely basic, any reasonably trained CS masters/PhD student can ramp up to SOTA in a year or two.