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Who's afraid of Chinese models?

stratechery.com

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Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#2
> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation

Sounds great to me; live by the sword, die by the sword.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#4
post #2

> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…

I am immediately sold on this.

Sorry, OpenAI & Anthropic.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#6
The article makes a point about agent harnesses being sticky (the supposed moat). I have been building my own agent harness for a while, and I can tell with confidence that the harness almost does not matter, the entirety of the AI magic is the model itself. The harness can be almost barebones (like, for example, mini-swe-agent used for benchmarks), and yet the model still does the task just fine.

So from my perspective, it's doubtful that this is the moat. Besides, for example, Claude Code in particular is so buggy (and always has been).

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#7
But it’s a problem to be dependent on China. The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service that forbid distillation, for U.S. companies at a minimum.

I'm amazed that no one is talking about proposals that are surely being discussed in Washington and pushed by SV lobbyists to restrict Chinese models on national security grounds, or other some other basis.

The belief that Bytedance could engineer a finger on the algorithmic scales to serve the interests of the Chinese Communist Party led to a lot of debate in Washington, and ultimately resulted in TikTok being divested from its Chinese owners. Huawei is shut out from the U.S. market, which limits its business even in markets where it's not banned because it's effectively stamped with a scarlet letter.

IMHO, Chinese models are headed for a similar fate or at least a showdown in Washington or the courts because they are supported and/or controlled by entities which ultimately serve the CCP.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#8
While intelligence is said to be a replaceable commodity, oil and copper can be used in nearly the same way even if you change suppliers as long as the quality grade is matched. However, I question whether two models that produce the same benchmark answers are actually interchangeable in real world use.

Personally, I think models will increasingly become specialized in different areas, some good at X, others good at Y, and we might see workflows that mix multiple models.

Re: Who's afraid of Chinese models?

#9
post #2

> distillation: why exactly is it bad? After all, what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models that are themselves being distilled? Who is exactly being wronged here? ... The U.S. should pass a law that (1) makes explicit that collecting data for training models is fair use, and (2) bars terms of service th…

Don’t know much about how distillation works so please enlighten me here.

> what are large language models but the distillation of all of the knowledge on the open Internet, scraped by the frontier labs and distilled into the models

If it’s as easy as that why do they choose to distill another model and not distill the knowledge on the open Internet from scratch?

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