Dear XYZ,

the administration would investigate whether Chinese artificial intelligence companies had improperly distilled American models to power their own, saying that the U.S. can “sanction” companies that engage in intellectual property theft. Politico

I find it quite absurd whenever frontier model companies (or in this case the US administration) talk about distillation being some kind of assault on the work done by the frontier labs.

If they were to posit that they deserve some kind of IP protection over their model, or outputs of their model, wouldn’t that be incongruent with how they believe that training their model on copyrighted material amounts to fair use?

I think that this is the original sin of AI. I don’t think model trainers, even though their burning through their cash stockpiles on training these models, have any kind of moral authority to claim that they have been stolen from.

They are the ones who stole first.

xoxo,
K