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Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

reuters.com

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Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#491

Post by eru »

tristanj wrote: post #25

Here's what is happening: Chinese resellers are offering Claude tokens at 70-90% below official Anthropic API prices. They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output & reasoning chains to various Chinese labs. They are subsidizing model access in exchange for user logs and reasoning traces, which they then sell as training data, allowing the…

> This is one reason why DeepSeek & GLM are priced so cheaply, they are competing with impossibly low token prices in China. They have to keep prices low, in order for people to use them.

Sounds a bit circular? Aren't the companies working on these models than also the ones that are paying the subsidy (via paying for training data)?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#492

Post by eru »

petterroea wrote: post #306
gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold. The difference is that in the US subsidies come from VC, while OP implies subsidies come from the AI labs that buy the training data (which may as well also be VC backed, so just one extra hop). This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom wh…

> This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market.

Why? Lots of people try this tactic, but hardly anyone ever succeeds. Meanwhile, the customer benefits.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#494

Post by jorisw »

fnord77 wrote: post #344
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

There's two basic kinds of distillation: 1) the massive [and dumb] method where you ask a question and use the answer as reinforcement (Black Box), and 2) more targeted distillation where you use one model to directly inform/train/guide another model (RLAIF). The latter is basically fine-tuning the model with direction from another model. Thousands of businesses do this every day to fine-tune. This is almost certainl…

Can you reach into the model and "transplant" weights directly?

No, you'd need to have the model on your filesystem for direct access, and then the architecture would need to be the same.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#495

Post by woctordho »

cm2187 wrote: post #472
0xbadcafebee wrote: post #11

There's two basic kinds of distillation: 1) the massive [and dumb] method where you ask a question and use the answer as reinforcement (Black Box), and 2) more targeted distillation where you use one model to directly inform/train/guide another model (RLAIF). The latter is basically fine-tuning the model with direction from another model. Thousands of businesses do this every day to fine-tune. This is almost certainl…

Stupid question: I was under the impression that these models were trained on PB of data. Surely the amount of questions/response they can extract from querying a bigger model (Claude) is fairly modest. How is it not a drop vs the training dataset?

Actually nowadays LLMs are only trained with TBs rather than PBs of data, and it's not too hard to find GBs of agent traces online.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#497

Post by woctordho »

eru wrote: post #492
petterroea wrote: post #306

Earlier quoted context omitted.

China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold. The difference is that in the US subsidies come from VC, while OP implies subsidies come from the AI labs that buy the training data (which may as well also be VC backed, so just one extra hop). This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom wh…

> This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom where the one with most money gets to stay in the market. As with most venture capital startups. I believe this VC tactic is a well documented "cheat code" to bypass market forces and build a monopoly. I find it hard to compare that with a free market. Why? Lots of people try this tactic, but hardly anyone ever succeeds. Meanwhil…

Lots of people have succeeded. Neither Anthropic nor OpenAI has any technical advantage in the field of subscription engineering.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#499

Post by tasuki »

tripleee wrote: post #341
wilg wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because Anthropic has terms of service with more stipulations than just "you must pay and can use the service for any purpose"?

violating their terms of service doesn't make it fraudulent?

Are you not violating terms of service? Have you ever read any? I wouldn't call you fraudulent though!

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#500

Post by haritha-j »

petterroea wrote: post #306
gaiagraphia wrote: post #115

This is great for competition! Chinese vendors offering a cheaper solution = what economics told me the free market was all about. I also learnt that Anthropic should get better at what they do if they want to compete. If not, somebody else will win. Or does this not apply to huge US corporations any more?

China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one (which is already subsidized) in order to gain foothold. The difference is that in the US subsidies come from VC, while OP implies subsidies come from the AI labs that buy the training data (which may as well also be VC backed, so just one extra hop). This isn't "the market working as intended", this is an exhaustion fight to the bottom wh…

Which part are we supposed to have an issue with? The selling data to offer cheaper compute? Products taking over markets with below cost pricing because they have money and ruining the free market?

Because all of that is considered totally okay when every single US big tech company does it.

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