Jensen Huang says AI distillation is 'competition.'
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
I'm not sure "competition" is necessarily the right word but I don't think that model creators and their political backers have a leg to stand on when complaining about distillation.
Original:
Smells like a CEO justifying theft. It is reasonable to believe Wong thinks differently about law breaking, given this article.
Something something legal liabilities something something?
Regarding CEOs - it looks pretty common yes.
I think rule breaking is a quality I've seen in entrepreneurs, thinking differently to use that euphemism. Challenging the dominant paradigm, to be tongue-in-cheek.
I imagine it's a quality engendered by business leadership schools or maybe Market economics? To Find a need and fill it, but taken to the extreme. Can be figuring out where the illegal line is and walking it.
Next, Commenting on the actual article again ..
China, the Chinese government has a known history of stealing technology from other nations. (Aside: I assume all governments do this, State-Sponsored espionage/industrial or whatever.) So that is actual theft. China is also supporting industries that it considers strategically important to success. I am ignorant at the difference between, or limitation of reach of a Chinese government supported influence of theft activities, versus a business that happens to be in China and exhibits theft behavior All on its own.
The area that I'm puzzling about is noticing how this business leader is in a position, through extraordinary concentration of wealth and power, to influence the efficacy of state-sponsored industrial espionage by helping to propose state-level policies by the United States and internationally. I don't know if the word oligarchy is the right word, but, it's like a corporation can author international financial and political policy. Pretty wild considering Nvidia was just like a $80 stock back in in the late '90s.
It's entirely possible for AI output to be copyrighted if it meets the requirements; prompting an AI takes some skill.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monkey_selfie_copyright_disput...
Acquiring and setting up a camera for the right shot takes some skill. That does not matter.
It's worth noting in your case that no determination of copyright was actually made by a court (well, almost: a court ruled that the monkey definitely didn't have copyright and that even if it did they wouldn't make PETA its guardian).
Some opinions were issued but those are non-binding and eventually the photographer gave up because litigating copyright is expensive.
IANAL, but going from copyrighted texts to an AI model likely constitutes a new original creation, not a slavish reproduction. Whereas going from one AI model to another is more likely to be considered a slavish reproduction reproduction, although arguably AI models are not copyrightable to the extent that the weights are objective facts, like entries in a phone book.
Stole all other important information embedded in the relationship (the essence of the relationship itself).
This is not seen as theft to only two or three types of people:
1) Technically ignorant
2) Or Technically ignorant and morally bankrupt
3) Truly evil, a combination of technically capable, and morally bankrupt.
(An “Abomination” is also possible, unaware and unable to perceive morality , not just mere ignorance. For example, it is tremendously generous to call an Abomination ignorant or amoral, that’s a compliment to such a thing. Would Jensen Huang know about the words coming out of his mouth, is the true question really.)
But I don’t see how copyright has anything to do with anything. Copyright is a legal concept, not an ethical concept. Training an LLM on copyrighted material is legal. Ethically, whether a work that the LLM trained on is copyrighted or not has no relevance
while I generally agree on his open weight stances, I lost all respect in that moment, everyone of these people are so out of touch
He said „The majority of the kids shouldn't learn”, not everybody. I listened to that pod and was under the impression that he wants to be portrayed as a "grounded" person and i didn't find his takes to be out of touch.
I once had a roommate who I encouraged to divide our grocery bill by 2 in his head for splitting the bill, by the end of the year he was quick and accurate.
You can definitely get past algebra without knowing your times tables, but algebra isn't going to help you in the checkout line to make sure you received the correct amount of change and bought the correct number of goods.
practice makes perfect, exercise your brain like your body
The memorization means that you can extrapolate the more complex concepts. If you don't have the very basics, what are you even going to extrapolate on?
It does not mean that. It means you can parrot a number if it came from the memorized set.
How has this enabled you to engage in higher-level thinking instead of syntax correctness?
(I saw this pattern first hand with 100s of students while teaching intro cs)
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my current favorite definition for The Singularity is the point at which humans give up critical thinking and have decided deferring to Ai is the better idea, social media being a stepping stone on that path that primed us for the outsourcing
much of the commentary under this submission has me thinking we are well on our way in this journey
But IME, not having the knowledge is a major handicap. I did eventually learn essentially the full multiplication table with speedy recall and it _is_ useful in day-to-day life. I think its basic numeracy on a par with literacy if you ever have to do basics like compare prices for consumer goods, sanity check claimed facts/statistics, etc. I don’t think those skills go away when you have AI anymore than they do when you can “trust” Amazon to do the price math for you.
> If you don’t like that, if you don’t like people to use your products, all you [have to do is] know your customers, and disable the service
Considering the current situation, I understand Mr. Huang point, but that's not how the copyright framework assumed to be working from the beginning. It should protect both small actors (authors) and the big companies from unrestricted use of creative works. Now this mechanism seems to be practically dysfunctional.
And a big portion of this lies on shoulders of proponents of permissive OSS, who defend an idea of (almost) unrestricted use of their source code texts for many years, and long before mass LLM scrapping became a thing.
Here's Xiaomi's discussion of this, plus their open-sourcing of 7000+ RL training environments.
https://www.alphaxiv.org/abs/2609.mimo-scaling-reinforcement...
https://mimo.mi.com/docs/en-US/news/latest/v2-6
Who needs a few of someone else's "vacation postcards" of their post-training experience when your agents can go on vacation themselves!
im not suggesting that they should, but it's so much more than the garbage both antigravity and codex show to users. seems like a thing a company paranoid about distillation would reign in.
You can compete fairly or unfairly.
In any event, distillation seems to be in a grey enough area that reasonable people can disagree (IMO). It strikes me as more akin to theft than to fair competition, but it doesn't seem like it should be treated as criminal. Rather, I think the onus should be on the labs to defend themselves against it.
All that said, Jensen's take is clearly quite biased.
And, in fact, they already do this:
- OpenAI [1]: "[you may not] Use Output to develop models that compete with OpenAI."
- Google [2]: "You may not use the Services to develop machine learning models or related technology."
- Anthropic [3]: "[You may not use our services] to develop any products or services that compete with our Services, including to develop or train any artificial intelligence or machine learning algorithms or models or resell the Services"
[1] https://openai.com/policies/row-terms-of-use/
[2] https://policies.google.com/terms/generative-ai/archive/2023...
https://www.reuters.com/world/china/chinas-deepseek-trained-...
His company has been public longer than you’ve been solvent.
The shareholder part is also not correct in they way it's being implied.
The idea that CEOs’ hands are tied, and that they are kept on some sort of short legal leash, is largely (though not entirely) a fiction.
Why should Ai be different?
Fortunately open weights are likely to dominate and it becomes a permissionless ecosystem