What is "illegal" about it?
In the PRC, they[1] leaked tons of national secrets on the PRC's latest AI campaigns, the inner workings of their "opinion monitoring" (read: performative panopticon) and "stability" (read: violent oppression) departments, Chengdu's whole CCTV network, direct-energy weapons plans, espionage activities in Syria to hunt down Uyghur refugees, and god knows what else that Anthropic didn't divulge to us common folk.
In the US, it's very clearly an attempt to rip off a competitor. I'm not sure how else you could possibly see it. Even if you're a distillation fan in general (which A. why and B. plz don't), they did this through a network of Japanese and Signaporean shell accounts, presumably at least some of which were abusing Anthropic's subscription service in a ToS double-whammy, as it would be exorbitantly expensive otherwise. They also had to hack around Anthropic's API to get CoT traces, which seems impossible to explain away as anything innocent.
I've been beating the "China isn't necessarily an enemy, it's gonna take us all to handle AI" drum for literally years, but this attack was just... gross. Gross in scale and gross in arrogance. Not a good sign for the dawning alignment crisis, to say the least :(
TL;DR: Use these services if you want, but know that you're supporting aggressive escalations and companies that very clearly don't give a flying fuck about violating the law, much less your ToS. So... buyer beware, I guess.
[1]: For clarity, Z.ai was not alone in this, nor were they most egregious attack -- Moonshot.ai (kimi) took that coveted prize. DeepSeek was involved, too.
> use these services if you want, but know that you're supporting aggressive escalations and companies that very clearly don't give a flying fuck about violating the law, much less your ToS
From my European point of view the same risk/concerns apply when using US providers
Alignment is meaningless; as you've noticed, humans aren't all that "morally aligned".
If the tool needs safety measures it should be kept in a safe enclosure like we do with CNC machines, furnaces, and so on.
Alignment is meaningless; as you've noticed, humans aren't all that "morally aligned".
- Is what [DICTATOR/MURDERER/CRIMINAL] bad, or merely not to your taste? If the latter, then you have no coherent reason to argue they should be punished. We would never imprison people who don't like vanilla ice cream because 51% of the population does like it.
- If another culture had a deeply held belief to [HORRIBLE_THING] to, say, children, would you just shrug and say "different strokes for different folks"? What if [MURDERER] just had a different culture?
- No, the fact that nature is red in tooth and claw does not disprove morality; we are very, very, very far from our pre-rational, animalistic roots, and to go back now would be unthinkable.
If the tool needs safety measures it should be kept in a safe enclosure like we do with CNC machines, furnaces, and so on.
You didn't explain why it's illegal or why distillation is bad.
The broader discussion of why distillation is bad and dangerous and immoral is left as an exercise for the reader, as it was above with the parenthetical. It's not a complex argument; I guarantee you understand it if you're reading this.
Nulla poena sine lege?
I'm always wondering when "distillation" comes up how feasible it is, or if it's just BS... Or am I missing something here that makes real "distillation" feasible?
This is a great question still, not trying to shut you down. But I think the fundamental issue is a misunderstanding of what distillation is -- it's not directly stealing literal atomic parameters and piling them up. They might try to focus on substructures within these massive networks, but even that isn't strictly necessary for a distillation attack.
Source for 1? Are we sure those aren't hallucinations?
Like Anthropic and OpenAI are? After all, didn't they distill all the information in the world into their model(s)?
I mean, if they get to distill other's IP, why can't others distill their IP?
Yes, wont somebody please think of the shareholders whose IP had been stolen...
The struggle you have with pinning down moral relativism I think betrays the fact that your understanding of it is low quality. A good ear mark is, can you name a single passage from a treatise on moral relativism that you like? If you can't find a single aspect of a philosophical construction to advocate for, that means you don't actually understand it.
You also keep sliding between conflating moral relativism with moral anti-realism and even moral nihilism at one point. These are different axes.
> Realism + Absolutism
All moral facts converge for every single person. As a matter of fact, they aren't facts at all. Morals are a hinge of the Wittgenstein variety.
> Realism + Relativism
Moral facts are derived from frameworks, or contexts, which are themselves grounded facets of reality.
> Anti-Realism + Absolutism
Kantian Constructivism. There are no facts which are coherent without a framework, but moral claims are still necessarily only capable of being universal.
> Anti-Realism + Relativism
Moral reality is constructed by the framework, grounded only to the framework.
I mean, if they get to distill other's IP, why can't others distill their IP?
The Antrophic article mentions "16 million" conversations, GLM models are in the 700-300 billion parameter ranges and while the frontier sizes aren't know but Gemini suggests Astra and Mythos are at around 10 trillion. That'd amount to extracting 40k parameters per conversation without a lot of errors if it was just a distillation (from an unknown source/algorithm as opposed to distilling your own model).
Now, I can imagine these conversations being used as a verification step that they're not missing stuff in their training, and that their models are capable of most of the same things, but that's mostly confirming that they've stolen the same data from the public as Antrophic/OpenAI has stolen already.
Or am I missing something here that makes real "distillation" feasible?