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Comment by nonethewiser | Hacker News Reader

Im not so sure because we only seem to see distillation from China. What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude, GPT, etc. Do they simply lack the ability to?

Point being there may be no technical solution but there may be a political one (theoretically).

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Meta Spark is rumored to have distilled Claude to some extent, early Gemini models as well. I think the biggest factor is that Chinese companies arent really afraid of being sued by Anthropic because the juridictions are so disconnected. European/US companies don't have the same protection.

>What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude

literally nothing but given that the Chinese already did it and the models are published what's the point. You can thank the Chinese taxpayer for subsidizing the electricity bill and just download the thing

Aside from politics/law, it's probably much easier for everyone else to distill from the Chinese model which already distilled Claude/GPT/Gemini. Maybe not as good a result, but you don't need to jump through dozens of hoops.

This reminds me of the whisper game played in elementary school. Starts with a sentence and the person whispers it to the next kid who again whispers it and on and on until it goes around the circle where the last kid has to repeat the sentence. Hint it never once was even close to the starting phrase. I would love to see what one model copying another model that is again copied however many times would look like in the end.

Called, fittingly, Chinese Whispers in the UK. As an aside, I've always wondered if it was so called because, Chinese being a tonal language, it's much harder to whisper in.

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