I disagree, I think chinese distillation relies on making multiple accounts at a provider, signing Terms of Services and breaking them repeatedly, in addition to using fraud patterns like IP proxies and networks of credit cards.

I think that software execs should not incentivize users or other execs to break Terms of Services, or contracts of any kind.

An executive or manager of a company that breaks contracts is worth 0, there's no incentive to do business with them, if you know they will agree to doing or not doing something and then breaking that promise.

The word of a businessman is their most valuable asset, Tan is signalling that he is either misinformed on what Chinese distillation consists of, or that it's ok to do it.

FAQ:

- "But the frontier models do bad things too"

- An argument worthy of a 5 year old, one civil issue doesn't negate the other, bring it to a court if you have an actual claim against OAI or Claude, etc...

- "Companies have the right to reverse engineer"

- Ok, do it, but the moment you are creating 10K accounts in a Distributed fashion (Distributed as in the first D of DDoS), using IP proxies and stolen credit cards or your employees and employee family credit cards, you are not doing it because you believe you have a right, you are doing it despite not having a right to it.

EDIT:

Re(actually)reading the article, Tan's take is a bit more nuanced, he seems to be advocating for regulation to restrict the capacity of Foundation models to restrict usage, on the basis (or to the extent) that it was trained on public data, and therefore it belongs or attributes its success to a wealth of the commons.

My pre-existing quip is against those that want to solve this as-is by breaking the ToS. I think that's a weak version of Free Software position, it's very weak to complain that some software is proprietary and want to use it anyway, the strong FS position is that you don't even want to use it if it's proprietary, you won't catch a FS activist pirating proprietary software, they just don't use it and develop alternatives. Similarly it's not a FS position to distill a proprietary model (where you still wouldn't have source code at any rate).