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The Kimi K3 Moment

stephen.bochinski.dev

271–280 of 644 posts

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#271

Regardless of whether they achieved parity via distillation, or whether they got here via independently constructing a model from scratch, it was always going to end this way for the frontier American labs. Distillation “attacks” are not attacks. The frontier labs “distilled” all existing human written knowledge into their models, there was always going to be a second class lab that would distill that model into a ch…

Well, there is precedence: Google can scrape the web, but you can't scrape Google. Laws around compiled databases exist for a reason: you can't just copy the phone book if effort has gone into compiling it, it is itself copyrightable

That varies by jurisdiction. In the United States, copying the phone book (or otherwise copying facts from someone else's collection) has been legal since 1991:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feist_Publications,_Inc._v._Ru....

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is incorrect. Anthropic paid $1.5 billion in compensation to copyright holders for use of their content in training data. OpenAI pays hundreds of millions per year across 150+ licensing deals for access to copyrighted data. Meta and Alphabet have similar arrangements. Under the settlement, Anthropic was forced to delete the pirated data they were training on. Chinese labs can still train on pirated data. I doubt…

they didn't pay yet, because court challenged settlement as inadequate. > I doubt the Chinese models operate under similar licensing agreements. US corps likely pay licenses when afraid to be sued, or have troubles getting that data, otherwise they just take data, which was demonstrated many times. The same apply to Chinese corps, alibaba totally can be sued in US.

China is infamous for weakly enforcing copyright law. Even when it is completely obvious that Chinese labs are training models on pirated data, US copyright holders face a virtually impossible task of proving it in court. Those lawsuits won't go anywhere.

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#273

Earlier quoted context omitted.

they didn't pay yet, because court challenged settlement as inadequate. > I doubt the Chinese models operate under similar licensing agreements. US corps likely pay licenses when afraid to be sued, or have troubles getting that data, otherwise they just take data, which was demonstrated many times. The same apply to Chinese corps, alibaba totally can be sued in US.

China is infamous for weakly enforcing copyright law. Even when it is completely obvious that Chinese labs are training models on pirated data, US copyright holders face a virtually impossible task of proving it in court. Those lawsuits won't go anywhere.

There are tons of lawsuites which resulted in banning Chinese companies from doing business in US, those lawsuits totally have consequences.

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>People infringe on Anthropics IP No. Authors do not infringe on IP when they read another's book, nor should the lumber company be able to dictate how I use planks and if I can resell them if i'm done with them. You're framing it as if the added value of the author or lumber company, awards them consideration when somebody uses the products to create more value. IP law was always a big mess, and these questions cros…

There are some quite interesting legal implications here. If Anthropic has IP over output produced by agents, do they somehow have legal rights to code and documents produced by such agents? This would demolish agent usage by corporations.

General consensus is that neither the model nor its outputs can be protected IP

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#275
post #86
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I strongly suspect the flip side is that in the future it enables you to train smarter models by "distilling" the end result of the super duper heavily thinking models.

But these models already distill the smarter American ones ;)

It's turtles all the way down

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#276
post #51

Kimi K3 is really good, but it’s obviously worse than Fable, usually worse than Opus, in my experience.

Definitely not my experience. Fable is better but I'd prefer K3 to Opus based my experience with both.

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#277

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is incorrect. Anthropic paid $1.5 billion in compensation to copyright holders for use of their content in training data. OpenAI pays hundreds of millions per year across 150+ licensing deals for access to copyrighted data. Meta and Alphabet have similar arrangements. Under the settlement, Anthropic was forced to delete the pirated data they were training on. Chinese labs can still train on pirated data. I doubt…

That's like saying someone is a big proponent of community law and order, and they donated $1000 to the county sheriff when actually they got caught drunk speeding in a school zone.

A false equivalence. A more correct example is: Anthropic was speeding, got caught by the county sheriff, and paid the fine. Anthropic stopped speeding.

Meanwhile, Chinese labs are speeding in a different county. Everyone knows they are speeding, yet the sheriff won't pull them over, so they just keep doing it.

This lax enforcement gives Chinese labs a structural advantage over American ones.

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#278
I cannot imagine wanting the product of the entire intellectual output of humanity since recorded history to be an expensive, paywalled commercial product owned by 5 or so of the most insufferable, detestable people who ever lived. Why would you want to live in that world. We should all be rooting for open source AI to win.

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your comment feels like an outdated brain drain model where talented Chinese researchers naturally want to leave China and the only question is whether the US lets them in. That may have been closer to reality 10-20 years ago, China is a different country now, what I mean by that is they offer research funding, they have huge digital behemoths (alibaba, tencent, huawei, bytedance etc), large scale deployment opportun…

Chinese students still want to attend US universities [1]. While it is true that the progress made by China is a factor, this administration's policies are the bigger deterrent [2] [3]. [1] https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2025-02-21/why-ch... [2] https://www.wsj.com/world/china/americas-allure-fades-in-chi... [3] https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/jun/06/chinese-studen...

It doesn't really address the point. Chinese students wanting to attend US universities is evidence that US universities remain attractive, not that those students would otherwise permanently immigrate to the US or that China lacks attractive careers for them afterward.

US immigration policy may be unnecessarily pushing away talent but the assumption that talented Chinese researchers would naturally remain in America unless prevented from doing so ignores the growth of Chinese universities/labs, companies, their funding, national prestige etc.

I mean, don't get me wrong, US is still highly attractive, it is just no longer the only place where an ambitious Chinese researcher can do important work and grow.

Re: The Kimi K3 Moment

#280
post #261
post #257

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> and deleted there torrented copies and not released any models derived from them as a consequence. I have a bridge to sell you

Great, let's go down to the courthouse and get some sworn testimony as to the ownership, value, condition, and so on and so forth of the bridge. And some document review and discovery run through professional legal firms under the same conditions. And perfectly reasonable and verifiable explanations as to why you own the bridge and are selling it (namely that you bought a copy of literally every book in existence in…

I think you're right to point out that historically the rule of law in the United States has been very robust by the standards of whatever era, it's been a tremendous advantage in attracting business and capital and talent, it's good stuff.

But we've gone through some pretty weird times too. Turn of the last century was pretty tech billionaire edits, reconstruction was uh, not smooth, it's a mixed bag.

And most takes I hear seem to acknowledge that this is one of those weirder times: serious election fraud rhetoric from most everybody from 2016 to the present, very politicized courts (on both sides to be clear), very soft on anti-trust, very soft on adventurous accounting. The Epstein files and like, no consequences (pretty much uniquely for a developed nation with Epstein people). It's weird right now.

And I think I would be hard pressed to think of a weirder part of this weird time than the rule of law meets AI. We can haggle on where laws end and norms begin (stare decis being maybe the midpoint), but in the 90s, the Justice Department got their brass knuckles on for a lot less.

I don't think it's a simple "the law works nothing to see here" story.

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