Comment by armcat | Hacker News Reader

Comment by armcat | Hacker News Reader

This is such an insane rabbit hole. AI labs distill weights from the entirety of the internet knowledge, (mostly) without anyone's consent, which (technically) amounts to theft. However the chinchilla law dictates you need to expend X amount of energy to make this knowledge useful. Then the data law dictates that you need to shift the weights to a more useful latent space by paying maths, coding and domain experts lots of money. So you have "stolen" the data, but then paid billions to make it useful. And useful it is!

Then another lab comes, and "steals" from you - that beautiful, refined dataoil - by distilling your weights using inferior equipment but with a toolbox of ingenuity and low-level hacking tricks. They reach 90% of your performance at 20x cost reduction.

What happens when another lab distills from the distilled lab?

Who is the thief? How far will the Alice go?

What would you define as 'distillation' versus 'learning'? How do you know that what a LLM is doing is 'distillation' vs a process closer to a human reading a book?

From my perspective, pretraining is pretty clearly not 'distilling', as the goal is not to replicate the pretraining data but to generalize. But what these companies are doing is clearly 'distilling' in that they want their models to exactly emulate Claude's behavior.

That's a soft distinction (distilling vs learning). If I read a chapter in a text book I am distilling the knowledge from that chapter into my own latent space - one would hope I learn something. Flipping it the other way, you could say that model from Lab Y is ALSO learning the model from Lab X. Not just "distilling". Hence my original comment - how deep does this go?

And yet nearly every machine learning engineer would disagree with you, which is a given away that your argument is rooted in ideology.

> And yet nearly every machine learning engineer would disagree with you, which is a given away that your argument is rooted in ideology.

That's a bold statement! Of course I know the difference, in one case you are learning from correct/wrong answers, and in the other from a probability distribution. But in both cases you are using some X to move the weights. We can get down and gritty on KL divergence vs cross-entropy, but the whole topic is about "theft", which is perhaps in the eye of the beholder.

> which (technically) amounts to theft

Why bother writing so many words when you lack the discipline to choose the words with correct semantics?

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