alt Hacker NewsDistillation is a great thing for consumers. It improves competition and reduces the massive moats that OpenAI and Anthropic have in compute that would otherwise lead them to be duopolists. It’s also only fair that AIs trained on humanity’s wealth of knowledge for Pennie’s allow competition to train on humanity’s wealth of knowledge at market cost.
Replies
pastel8739 • today at 4:49 PM
He did actually specify that diffusion should be limited for authoritarian countries, which I appreciated. If his focus is really safety, distillation in countries that are bound by safety regulation should be fine
disgruntledphd2 • today at 3:33 PM
Yeah, we should give a limited copyright waiver for pre training, given that the model is released as open weight and allow labs to compete with RL on that basis.
Distillation is only a great thing for consumers as long as you ignore all AI risks, which are what this post is about. If you don't, you have to weight greater access to better open-source models against greater exposure to risks caused by these models existing. Everything hinges on how major you think the risks will be.