Distillation is fundamentally impossible to protect against. All you can do is slow them down. Change my view. Eventually these Chinese companies will release some extension like Honey, which will sit on top real, non-Chinese clients and send everything to China anyway. It's over.
It's too late to prevent distillation of some capabilities, like writing code or finding vulnerabilities [1]. But an AI lab can continue to produce immense economic value without releasing the model publicly for potential distillation. For example, it could use a model solely in-house to develop therapeutics. Hopefully there's a future where others can access frontier models, but it's not neccessary if preventing pro…
My long-term prediction for the sector is that frontier models will be so expensive that they will only be available for grant-funded projects at research institutions, like supercomputer clusters were 25 years ago.