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Comment by devsda | Hacker News Reader

> Frontier intelligence is extremely powerful; the distillation I did off Astra trajectories is proof enough that large models are not going anywhere

Wouldn't admitting this invite trouble due to accusations of distillation flying around between closed and open models.

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On the flip side, its important to know just how much we would be sacrificing if big frontier gets their way in convincing the courts that distillation is a bad thing

Yeah don't steal my stolen stuff.

Like this scene from Pirates of Silicon Valley between Bill Gates and Steve Jobs: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CBri-xgYvHQ Bill was saying that Steve was stealing from Xerox so it's okay if Bill stole from Xerox first.

I don't think anybody's denying that small models are doing distillation, the issue at hand is frontier lab vs frontier lab when it comes to big models.

Frontier model trainers stole almost all the data they've trained on (the whole internet, all copyrighted).

It's very hard for them to claim the moral high ground here.

It's like stealing an apple from the British Colonial Empire.

Having the moral high ground matters less than having a big warchest of money to spend on lawyers.

Does it matter if they companies doing are not in the jurisdiction or even if they are, maybe the can't prove it?

They can't prove it but can force you to spend time and money to disprove it.

The only thing they're going to try to do is ban Chinese models, and that's not going to fly outside the US, so Americans are going be the only losers.

Don't see the problem here actually.

You'd be shocked at some of the punishments handed out from various empires over history for offences as minor as stealing an apple. Whether they can claim the moral high ground is not question of ethics but a question of power.

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