alt Hacker NewsAlmost all markets depend on some form of regulation whether its as simple as "leave everyone alone but no stealing" or "every participant has to source every object through mountains of red tape."
Thus far the US has not really chosen to go the Chinese rare-earth method yet. The problem with distillation attacks is the end result is everyone who is not doing them is going to deal with some kind of regulation whether it's complete loss of access, or the amount of control you'll have to give up to access them will be ridiculous.
Sort of like the "stealing music is fine" but "lets freak out now that it's producing visual art", in the end the entire thing is a social construct. Whether this is treated as theft or "business as usual" is entirely societal.
Eventually the gap will close, unless there's a major breakthrough that hasn't been made yet.
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How is distillation an "attack" but gigascraping the Internet to the point of crashing servers and everyone needs Cloudflare and Anubis now not an "attack"?
I'm not aiming for a what about kickflip here: I'm saying we need to either agree on some rules or stop crying foul. Maybe the coherent legal theory is that neural networks and intellectual property don't interact. That would be weird but it would be consistent, a market could price it, I could do coding stuff and know if I was illegaling.
But this weird gerrymander that no judge will really rule on in an emphatic way is like, bad for the planet, bad for markets, bad business.
There are a lot of reasons to look forward to DeepSeek Huggingface drop kicking the unambiguous frontier weights in like, November, but I think my favorite one will be "who's distilling now bitch?"
> The problem with distillation attacks
Apologies for repeating myself here, but what you call "distillation" is function approximation.
I feel for the teams at Anthropic and Open AI, but unlike startups from prior eras; Anthropic and OpenAI have decided to be in the business of selling compute. Not creating a product that uses compute, but a product that's math running on compute. This is different from what Google is (or, rather was. As always, RIP Google 1998-2019).
Google's algorithm might be math, but Google search isn't. Google search is a process that's continuously operating in the background. Google crawls pages. Google stores and indexes what it finds. Google then exposes this to retrieval via its algorithm. User uses algorithm.
Now, let's compare that to AI models. When Anthropic serves Mythos / Opus etc, they're taking input or x from their user, doing compute, and then serving the result of the Mythos / Opus function, i.e.,
f(text) -> (text_transform)
According to Stone-Weierstrass, given enough values of y for f(x), anyone can approximate this function.
The fidelity and sophistication of this approximation definitely requires a lot of cleverness and effort, and it is arguably an imposition on Anthropic and OpenAI. But on a long-enough timeline, they don't even have to poll Anthropic or OpenAI. As the internet is flooded by PRs, content, emails written by Mythos / Claude, and just people otherwise sharing the results of Claude prompts, then there's an ever increasing set of data to approximate the f(x) that's f_Claude.
Eventually, in the future, anyone will be able to create a good enough approximation of the f_Mythos. Which is Anthropic's product.
Anthropic and OpenAI can now wage war on mathematics and the open-ended compute. Or, they can adapt and build a better product.
Choosing Option B was the Silicon Valley option / choice. I think the OG large-scale Valley lobbying effort, the Semiconductor Industry Association, was unique in that it prioritized and chose to do real research.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Industry_Associa...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semiconductor_Research_Corpora...
This helped the industry to survive and outcompete the pressure they were facing (at the time).
This is nothing like music piracy.
American labs have ripped everything out of the internet. And now they cry someone else is “stealing” from them. Cry me a river.
Given these models could not have been trained in the first place if they had to license every line of random fan fiction on the internet, I think distillation also being fair game is a tradeoff everyone should be willing to take (unless they want to decelerate, but that's a different conversation).