6 ms·

Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too

413 points by TheJCDenton 3d ago

deleted 3d ago
[deleted]
amelius 3d ago
Governments should be more concerned about the _people's_ personal data instead. Ban data brokers before you ban distillation.
- Legend2440 3d ago
  Unfortunately, the government doesn't want to ban data brokers because the government wants to buy from data brokers.
neilv 3d ago
Given the short-term pragmatic, conflicted way that AI tech adoption is happening... won't encouraging distillation effectively taint the entire space of open weights models, with the undisclosed biases of a few models that are under the influence of parties (certain billionaires and politicians) known for aggression and duplicity, and not for admirable ethics? Following news of companies and projects increasingly moving to open weights models. As AI gets more central to society, we really need to know how the weights were determined. Open weights isn't just "free as in beer"; it can be "free as in the mystery drug that creepy guy chatting you up at the bar offered you". And maybe even he doesn't even know everything that went into the tablets, since he too was being worked, by an organ-theft ring who will be harvesting both of you tonight. That's an analogy to get your attention. Your LLM probably isn't going to steal your organs. But in the current environment, it does and will have ideological biases determined by those with direct and indirect influence over it. And there will be a massive market for commercial influence biases (look at how previous generations of adtech invaded almost all technology companies). And there's incentive for military and spying capabilities to be buried in the models, perhaps as long-term sleepers. Maybe some organized crime trojans, too, depending which model you pick up. In this low-trust environment of the current real world, we need genuine open source models, not closed "open weights", and not mindlessly distilling black boxes gifted by sketchy powerful interests.
sick_of_slop 3d ago
Frontier labs trained their models on the entirety of human knowledge and didn't ask permission. It's a "want" or "should" it's a moral imperative to distill their models.
consumer451 3d ago
> To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. “The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there’s just one company,” he said. “It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there’s one company that’s monolithic. And that would be bad. Well yes, as I think I said in a previous comment, on the current trajectory OpenAI and Anthropic will really stop releasing models due to distillation and regulatory pressures. Then, they would eat all knowledge work themselves, which would be the end of YC.
dofm 3d ago
Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there’s a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service I do not agree with this man all that often, but that is very concisely put.
gr_norm 3d ago
Society as a whole has paid into this technology: through the theft of its intellectual property, through having to deal with the pillaging of so many commons (digital or otherwise) by it, through skyrocketing energy and computing device prices, and even just through ordinary investment. Democratize the technology! At the very least, don't step in legally to prevent this from happening.
Edwinat23 3d ago
Freefire
dvt 3d ago
I think OpenAI and Anthropic will go bust, or at least be scrapped for parts in the next 5 years or so. It's clear that the extreme cost used up for training is impossible to recoup, as inference is already being subsidized. It's also clear that, as Tan indicates, open-weight models will be (and basically already are) just as good as frontier models. It's all about the harness, baby. We will have two main forks in the road, and two new industries created: - AI hardware (NVidia/Cerebras/etc.), the equivalent of Intel/AMD - AI software (harnesses, assistants, etc.) the equivalent of Microsoft/Apple We already saw a glimmer of this with popularity of OpenClaw—the problem is that it's janky, hard to set up, inconsistent, and very hacker-esque. Imo "AI labs" will be a dying breed because there's no real money in the actual models if they get commoditized, which they already kind of are.
- Legend2440 3d ago
  >inference is already being subsidized. Inference is not being subsidized and in fact has pretty high margins. Similar-sized open weight models on openrouter are 15x cheaper per token than the big labs. This should reflect the isolated cost of inference, since 3rd party hosts have no reason to subsidize and no training costs to amortize. Only datacenter buildout costs are being subsidized.
  - dvt 3d ago
    > Inference is not being subsidized and in fact has pretty high margins. I was referring to the "AI labs" here. Sam Altman himself conceded that OpenAI is losing money on the $200 subscription. Using open-weight/open-source models is indeed cheaper (and no reason for inference to be subsidized).
    - Legend2440 3d ago
      That's not what I mean. If competitors can offer tokens 15x cheaper, the big labs must have high margins per token. (which they can use to amortize training costs) >Sam Altman himself conceded that OpenAI is losing money on the $200 subscription. They have since stopped offering the $200 subscription, probably for this reason. Subscription margins are harder to judge because it depends on usage; token costs are a better comparison.
etdznots 3d ago
This is all based on the delusion that Chinese labs are mindlessly distilling the frontier. I would love for a US lab to be at or near the frontier with an open weight model, but it’s going to take some serious elbow grease, and yes some distillation (which btw OAI, anthropic et al, also use distillation of other’s outputs in their training)
zetazzed 3d ago
Ok, but how do the economics of this work? Based on its settlement, Anthropic paid an average of $3000 per work they scanned based on their settlement (https://tech-insider.org/au/anthropic-copyright-settlement-2026/ https://tech-insider.org/au/anthropic-copyright-settlement-2...). They and OpenAI pay billions per year for a mix of experts and normal people to label or create data. Why would they continue doing this if the value of this is immediately copied by open models? If your goal is to end the economics of generating and buying data for AI (and I recognize for some people this is really the goal) then sure, but if you want AI for various subfields of interest to continue improving then it's not workable. Back when people made arguments for software privacy, the argument was usually "big business will still pay and consumers wouldn't have paid anyways so it's ok for us to pirate" - I actually think that was fine for business software but terrible for indie games, whose market was 0% businesses. But in the AI case, it's not like they get to keep some of the value of their investment - it all gets cloned into models that businesses and consumers alike are happy to use. If someone knows how labs could continue to fund data creation and acquisition in this model, please do share!
- wonnage 3d ago
  Surely if you hoover up every book in existence to feed into an ai model you must be extracting more than 1.5B in value. If not then it’s not a viable business.
- kingleopold 3d ago
  %99 of the startups fail, they are venture backed. Nobody or no market forced them to spend like that. It's all their decisions
- kadoban 3d ago
  > Anthropic paid an average of $3000 per work they scanned based on their settlement Not sure you get to count breaking the law and getting in trouble in your cost-of-doing-business. That's a little too on the nose. You're basically arguing that a criminal syndicate must be allowed to continue and we're required to make their business model make sense?
- etdznots 3d ago
Hikikomori 3d ago
Garry also goes to Thiels silicon valley church.
layer8 3d ago
https://archive.ph/BnceE https://archive.ph/BnceE
9865322689965 3d ago
[dead]
zombiwoof 3d ago
[dead]
fmnxl 3d ago
If it were so easy why aren't the frontier labs doing it themselves?
- layer8 3d ago
  Distilled models are worse than the original, so you can’t fully compete. Also, if all frontier labs did that, there would be nothing left to distill from.
okasaki 3d ago
Like Gates saying there should be UBI, or Musk saying... well, whatever. They know it won't happen, so arguing for it is 'effectively free' and purely personal marketing. A bullshit game played by politicians and wannabes.
- seanmcdirmid 3d ago
  Gates probably honestly believes in UBI; the guy is practical to a fault but evil misleading genius he is not. I actually don’t see any better options than UBI long term.
  - wannabe44 3d ago
    Only ways to rise in a UBI society where AI is supposed to replace intellectual work is crime and prostitution. Smart people who want better lives than the average will have to get into crime.
    - seanmcdirmid 3d ago
      A UBI society doesn't mean jobs aren’t available. There most certainly will be jobs. But with UBI and universal healthcare, the jobs can pay whatever the market really demands. People always complain about the government subsidizing low Walmart wages for example, but with UBI that argument is moot. Liberalizing the labor market wouldn’t mean less jobs, it would mean more (we would also have to lean more on corporate and consumption taxes rather than taxes around employment which would also make employment easier).
  - dgellow 3d ago
    Gates has been a ruthless fairly evil genius business man his whole life
ViktorRay 3d ago
https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 Garry Tan and Sam Altman recently did this interview together. They seemed pretty friendly with each other during it. Wonder what Sam Altman would say about Tan advocating for OpenAI’s models to be distilled. Then again this is the same OpenAI that has gotten into legal trouble recently regarding Apple’s IP so who knows
pton_xd 3d ago
Agreed! Allow US companies to innovate by creating an ecosystem of smaller, more efficient open weight models and it will be a net benefit for everyone. Distillation is a good thing. Preventing token-consumers from developing competing products should be litigated as anti-competitive behavior.
re-thc 3d ago
There were comparisons and Muse Spark is so very similar to Fable / Opus... so...
quicklywilliam 3d ago
I see it as analogous to companies building fiber in the public ROW during the last big infrastructure bubble. Under the Telecoms Act, these companies had to allow competitors to use their fiber at a fair price. Similarly, AI companies should be required to allow distillation at a fair price. Fair Use doesn’t make sense as a social contract if it only cuts one way!
- jimnotgym 3d ago
  But if they tried to set a fair price they would have to report how much money they are losing on each token sold. This might be bad for the real business of ai firms, hoovering up as much capital as they can
brcmthrowaway 3d ago
[flagged]
kelnos 3d ago
I agree. The frontier models are based on training data from tons of copyrighted work. Some of that work was obtained illegally, even. They could not exist without strip-mining the commons. The labs have no moral or ethical ownership to the end result, and others should feel free to treat any company-imposed restrictions on their use as invalid. I don't expect Tan's position to be based on any kind of real moral high ground, but his conclusion is correct. I love the "illicit distillation attacks" framing from the incumbents. There's nothing illicit. There's no attack. You just don't like it because it threatens your market position and business model.
- Aurornis 3d ago
  There is nothing illegal about training on traces from frontier models. However the frontier labs don’t have to serve customers who are farming the service for distillation purposes. That’s their choice and they’re free to make it if they detect distillation happening.
  - darth_avocado 3d ago
    I would argue they should have to. They scraped data off others, a lot of whom did not want that data to be used for AI training, and still had to share it with the frontier labs. It’s only fair they should have to hand it back. The only way US maintains dominance over Chinese models is by having an ecosystem of models. Relying on a small set of frontier labs will only let you get ahead temporarily. I agree with Gary Tan on this one.
  - hlynurd 3d ago
    That's fine, they just gotta tone down the victim rhetoric.
    - ronsor 3d ago
      Yes, I think this is the main issue. I don't care what policies the AI labs have or enforce, but they need to stop acting like ToS violations are an international crisis demanding intervention instead of a boring civil dispute at most.
TheJCDenton 3d ago
> He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn’t ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. I think this should desactivate the moral high ground from which Anthropic is trying to speak. That they would want to make distillation orderly IMHO is fair, but to make it illegal is very rich from any AI frontier lab, really.
- deleted 3d ago
  [deleted]
- Bluestein 3d ago
  Also, as said elsewhere: "Lab" is rich here, for outfits that, facing these giant, energy swallowing black boxes have really no clue what's going on inside.- The moniker gives them an air of scientific, knowledgeable, tranquil, pro-social, pro bono work.- Of course they are entitled to kill off a few mice, or pillage the commons to forward their "lab" work.-
  - samizdis 3d ago
    > The moniker gives them an air of scientific, knowledgeable, tranquil, pro-social, pro bono work. The Atlantic argued this (rather well, IMO) a week or so ago - "There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab’" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/stop-calling-ai-companies-labs/688528/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/stop-calling-...
  - Den_VR 3d ago
    “We don’t know what’s going on” is essentially marketing. Sure we don’t _know_ but we have intuitions about why, where, and how to make certain changes…
    - numpad0 3d ago
      Those labs publicly said during GPT-3/4 era that the optimal epoch count, or dataset repetition count, for foundation model training, is one. So it's a forward 1-pass compression. But it's a black box! Nobody knows whats going on inside! It's all transformative! Sure...
gnarlouse 3d ago
you want smaller models with comparable capabilities. for resource efficiency, market efficiency, environmental conservation.
YuechenLi 3d ago
Distilling frontier models is a brute force approach that rapidly hits diminishing returns after bootstrap because of the unevenness of the data. The simpler and more effective method is to have dedicated "teacher" frontier LLMs to generate targeted training data sets specifically for training new models and adjust on the fly based on feedback from the student model.
Betelbuddy 3d ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655978
matt3210 3d ago
Distillation is fair use
matt3210 3d ago
Net neutrality anyone? If AI is critical to getting work done in the modern era, its access should be guaranteed. Anyone banned from accessing frontier AI is being forcibly left behind. This includes distillation.
artk42 3d ago
I can't believe to hear such a wisdom from Garry Tan.
seydor 3d ago
They should be called speakeasys
hintymad 3d ago
> To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. Isn't this exactly what Dario wanted? He thought he knew what's best for the humanity...
davidguetta 3d ago
Yes and there's even a stronger argument that we could REQUIRE frontier model to be open weight / open source. At the end of the day they were built from data that did not belong to them. So it would be fair that humanity REQUIRES to give back the output of that. It's a bit like the free software thing: you can still make money from it and providing service to it, but if you build it based on another free stuff the derivative should be free. Why not do the same for intelligence ?

413 points by TheJCDenton 3d ago

deleted 3d ago

[deleted]

Governments should be more concerned about the _people's_ personal data instead. Ban data brokers before you ban distillation.

Legend2440 3d ago
Unfortunately, the government doesn't want to ban data brokers because the government wants to buy from data brokers.

neilv 3d ago

Given the short-term pragmatic, conflicted way that AI tech adoption is happening... won't encouraging distillation effectively taint the entire space of open weights models, with the undisclosed biases of a few models that are under the influence of parties (certain billionaires and politicians) known for aggression and duplicity, and not for admirable ethics? Following news of companies and projects increasingly moving to open weights models. As AI gets more central to society, we really need to know how the weights were determined. Open weights isn't just "free as in beer"; it can be "free as in the mystery drug that creepy guy chatting you up at the bar offered you". And maybe even he doesn't even know everything that went into the tablets, since he too was being worked, by an organ-theft ring who will be harvesting both of you tonight. That's an analogy to get your attention. Your LLM probably isn't going to steal your organs. But in the current environment, it does and will have ideological biases determined by those with direct and indirect influence over it. And there will be a massive market for commercial influence biases (look at how previous generations of adtech invaded almost all technology companies). And there's incentive for military and spying capabilities to be buried in the models, perhaps as long-term sleepers. Maybe some organized crime trojans, too, depending which model you pick up. In this low-trust environment of the current real world, we need genuine open source models, not closed "open weights", and not mindlessly distilling black boxes gifted by sketchy powerful interests.

sick_of_slop 3d ago

Frontier labs trained their models on the entirety of human knowledge and didn't ask permission. It's a "want" or "should" it's a moral imperative to distill their models.

consumer451 3d ago

> To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. “The nightmare scenario, the doomer scenario for AI is that there’s just one company,” he said. “It has the best access to capital. It has the best AI researchers. It runs away with it and suddenly there’s one company that’s monolithic. And that would be bad. Well yes, as I think I said in a previous comment, on the current trajectory OpenAI and Anthropic will really stop releasing models due to distillation and regulatory pressures. Then, they would eat all knowledge work themselves, which would be the end of YC.

dofm 3d ago

Controlling what users and customers do with API calls to closed weight models feels constraining, and there’s a role government can play here to normalize the fact that access to intelligence that was trained on broad public access data should itself also be more a form of a public good than something locked away behind restrictive terms of service I do not agree with this man all that often, but that is very concisely put.

gr_norm 3d ago

Society as a whole has paid into this technology: through the theft of its intellectual property, through having to deal with the pillaging of so many commons (digital or otherwise) by it, through skyrocketing energy and computing device prices, and even just through ordinary investment. Democratize the technology! At the very least, don't step in legally to prevent this from happening.

Edwinat23 3d ago

Freefire

dvt 3d ago

I think OpenAI and Anthropic will go bust, or at least be scrapped for parts in the next 5 years or so. It's clear that the extreme cost used up for training is impossible to recoup, as inference is already being subsidized. It's also clear that, as Tan indicates, open-weight models will be (and basically already are) just as good as frontier models. It's all about the harness, baby. We will have two main forks in the road, and two new industries created: - AI hardware (NVidia/Cerebras/etc.), the equivalent of Intel/AMD - AI software (harnesses, assistants, etc.) the equivalent of Microsoft/Apple We already saw a glimmer of this with popularity of OpenClaw—the problem is that it's janky, hard to set up, inconsistent, and very hacker-esque. Imo "AI labs" will be a dying breed because there's no real money in the actual models if they get commoditized, which they already kind of are.

Legend2440 3d ago
>inference is already being subsidized. Inference is not being subsidized and in fact has pretty high margins. Similar-sized open weight models on openrouter are 15x cheaper per token than the big labs. This should reflect the isolated cost of inference, since 3rd party hosts have no reason to subsidize and no training costs to amortize. Only datacenter buildout costs are being subsidized.
- dvt 3d ago
  > Inference is not being subsidized and in fact has pretty high margins. I was referring to the "AI labs" here. Sam Altman himself conceded that OpenAI is losing money on the $200 subscription. Using open-weight/open-source models is indeed cheaper (and no reason for inference to be subsidized).
  - Legend2440 3d ago
    That's not what I mean. If competitors can offer tokens 15x cheaper, the big labs must have high margins per token. (which they can use to amortize training costs) >Sam Altman himself conceded that OpenAI is losing money on the $200 subscription. They have since stopped offering the $200 subscription, probably for this reason. Subscription margins are harder to judge because it depends on usage; token costs are a better comparison.

etdznots 3d ago

This is all based on the delusion that Chinese labs are mindlessly distilling the frontier. I would love for a US lab to be at or near the frontier with an open weight model, but it’s going to take some serious elbow grease, and yes some distillation (which btw OAI, anthropic et al, also use distillation of other’s outputs in their training)

zetazzed 3d ago

Ok, but how do the economics of this work? Based on its settlement, Anthropic paid an average of $3000 per work they scanned based on their settlement (https://tech-insider.org/au/anthropic-copyright-settlement-2026/ https://tech-insider.org/au/anthropic-copyright-settlement-2...). They and OpenAI pay billions per year for a mix of experts and normal people to label or create data. Why would they continue doing this if the value of this is immediately copied by open models? If your goal is to end the economics of generating and buying data for AI (and I recognize for some people this is really the goal) then sure, but if you want AI for various subfields of interest to continue improving then it's not workable. Back when people made arguments for software privacy, the argument was usually "big business will still pay and consumers wouldn't have paid anyways so it's ok for us to pirate" - I actually think that was fine for business software but terrible for indie games, whose market was 0% businesses. But in the AI case, it's not like they get to keep some of the value of their investment - it all gets cloned into models that businesses and consumers alike are happy to use. If someone knows how labs could continue to fund data creation and acquisition in this model, please do share!

wonnage 3d ago
Surely if you hoover up every book in existence to feed into an ai model you must be extracting more than 1.5B in value. If not then it’s not a viable business.
kingleopold 3d ago
%99 of the startups fail, they are venture backed. Nobody or no market forced them to spend like that. It's all their decisions
kadoban 3d ago
> Anthropic paid an average of $3000 per work they scanned based on their settlement Not sure you get to count breaking the law and getting in trouble in your cost-of-doing-business. That's a little too on the nose. You're basically arguing that a criminal syndicate must be allowed to continue and we're required to make their business model make sense?
etdznots 3d ago

Hikikomori 3d ago

Garry also goes to Thiels silicon valley church.

layer8 3d ago

https://archive.ph/BnceE https://archive.ph/BnceE

9865322689965 3d ago

[dead]

zombiwoof 3d ago

[dead]

fmnxl 3d ago

If it were so easy why aren't the frontier labs doing it themselves?

layer8 3d ago
Distilled models are worse than the original, so you can’t fully compete. Also, if all frontier labs did that, there would be nothing left to distill from.

okasaki 3d ago

Like Gates saying there should be UBI, or Musk saying... well, whatever. They know it won't happen, so arguing for it is 'effectively free' and purely personal marketing. A bullshit game played by politicians and wannabes.

seanmcdirmid 3d ago
Gates probably honestly believes in UBI; the guy is practical to a fault but evil misleading genius he is not. I actually don’t see any better options than UBI long term.
- wannabe44 3d ago
  Only ways to rise in a UBI society where AI is supposed to replace intellectual work is crime and prostitution. Smart people who want better lives than the average will have to get into crime.
  - seanmcdirmid 3d ago
    A UBI society doesn't mean jobs aren’t available. There most certainly will be jobs. But with UBI and universal healthcare, the jobs can pay whatever the market really demands. People always complain about the government subsidizing low Walmart wages for example, but with UBI that argument is moot. Liberalizing the labor market wouldn’t mean less jobs, it would mean more (we would also have to lean more on corporate and consumption taxes rather than taxes around employment which would also make employment easier).
- dgellow 3d ago
  Gates has been a ruthless fairly evil genius business man his whole life

ViktorRay 3d ago

https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 https://youtu.be/ZIaOBAjvc38 Garry Tan and Sam Altman recently did this interview together. They seemed pretty friendly with each other during it. Wonder what Sam Altman would say about Tan advocating for OpenAI’s models to be distilled. Then again this is the same OpenAI that has gotten into legal trouble recently regarding Apple’s IP so who knows

pton_xd 3d ago

Agreed! Allow US companies to innovate by creating an ecosystem of smaller, more efficient open weight models and it will be a net benefit for everyone. Distillation is a good thing. Preventing token-consumers from developing competing products should be litigated as anti-competitive behavior.

re-thc 3d ago

There were comparisons and Muse Spark is so very similar to Fable / Opus... so...

quicklywilliam 3d ago

I see it as analogous to companies building fiber in the public ROW during the last big infrastructure bubble. Under the Telecoms Act, these companies had to allow competitors to use their fiber at a fair price. Similarly, AI companies should be required to allow distillation at a fair price. Fair Use doesn’t make sense as a social contract if it only cuts one way!

jimnotgym 3d ago
But if they tried to set a fair price they would have to report how much money they are losing on each token sold. This might be bad for the real business of ai firms, hoovering up as much capital as they can

brcmthrowaway 3d ago

[flagged]

kelnos 3d ago

I agree. The frontier models are based on training data from tons of copyrighted work. Some of that work was obtained illegally, even. They could not exist without strip-mining the commons. The labs have no moral or ethical ownership to the end result, and others should feel free to treat any company-imposed restrictions on their use as invalid. I don't expect Tan's position to be based on any kind of real moral high ground, but his conclusion is correct. I love the "illicit distillation attacks" framing from the incumbents. There's nothing illicit. There's no attack. You just don't like it because it threatens your market position and business model.

Aurornis 3d ago
There is nothing illegal about training on traces from frontier models. However the frontier labs don’t have to serve customers who are farming the service for distillation purposes. That’s their choice and they’re free to make it if they detect distillation happening.
- darth_avocado 3d ago
  I would argue they should have to. They scraped data off others, a lot of whom did not want that data to be used for AI training, and still had to share it with the frontier labs. It’s only fair they should have to hand it back. The only way US maintains dominance over Chinese models is by having an ecosystem of models. Relying on a small set of frontier labs will only let you get ahead temporarily. I agree with Gary Tan on this one.
- hlynurd 3d ago
  That's fine, they just gotta tone down the victim rhetoric.
  - ronsor 3d ago
    Yes, I think this is the main issue. I don't care what policies the AI labs have or enforce, but they need to stop acting like ToS violations are an international crisis demanding intervention instead of a boring civil dispute at most.

TheJCDenton 3d ago

> He also notes that the proprietary AI labs didn’t ask permission when they vacuumed up as much human knowledge as they could to train their models. I think this should desactivate the moral high ground from which Anthropic is trying to speak. That they would want to make distillation orderly IMHO is fair, but to make it illegal is very rich from any AI frontier lab, really.

deleted 3d ago
[deleted]
Bluestein 3d ago
Also, as said elsewhere: "Lab" is rich here, for outfits that, facing these giant, energy swallowing black boxes have really no clue what's going on inside.- The moniker gives them an air of scientific, knowledgeable, tranquil, pro-social, pro bono work.- Of course they are entitled to kill off a few mice, or pillage the commons to forward their "lab" work.-
- samizdis 3d ago
  > The moniker gives them an air of scientific, knowledgeable, tranquil, pro-social, pro bono work. The Atlantic argued this (rather well, IMO) a week or so ago - "There’s No Such Thing as an AI ‘Lab’" - https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/stop-calling-ai-companies-labs/688528/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/09/stop-calling-...
- Den_VR 3d ago
  “We don’t know what’s going on” is essentially marketing. Sure we don’t _know_ but we have intuitions about why, where, and how to make certain changes…
  - numpad0 3d ago
    Those labs publicly said during GPT-3/4 era that the optimal epoch count, or dataset repetition count, for foundation model training, is one. So it's a forward 1-pass compression. But it's a black box! Nobody knows whats going on inside! It's all transformative! Sure...

gnarlouse 3d ago

you want smaller models with comparable capabilities. for resource efficiency, market efficiency, environmental conservation.

YuechenLi 3d ago

Distilling frontier models is a brute force approach that rapidly hits diminishing returns after bootstrap because of the unevenness of the data. The simpler and more effective method is to have dedicated "teacher" frontier LLMs to generate targeted training data sets specifically for training new models and adjust on the fly based on feedback from the student model.

Betelbuddy 3d ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655978 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49655978

matt3210 3d ago

Distillation is fair use

matt3210 3d ago

Net neutrality anyone? If AI is critical to getting work done in the modern era, its access should be guaranteed. Anyone banned from accessing frontier AI is being forcibly left behind. This includes distillation.

artk42 3d ago

I can't believe to hear such a wisdom from Garry Tan.

seydor 3d ago

They should be called speakeasys

hintymad 3d ago

> To him, the true AI doomer scenario is for all the immense power of frontier AI to wind up in the hands of a single powerful, proprietary provider. Isn't this exactly what Dario wanted? He thought he knew what's best for the humanity...

davidguetta 3d ago

Yes and there's even a stronger argument that we could REQUIRE frontier model to be open weight / open source. At the end of the day they were built from data that did not belong to them. So it would be fair that humanity REQUIRES to give back the output of that. It's a bit like the free software thing: you can still make money from it and providing service to it, but if you build it based on another free stuff the derivative should be free. Why not do the same for intelligence ?