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Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

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Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#51

Post by davyAdewoyin »

slibhb wrote: post #32
CamperBob2 wrote: post #9

News flash: people who scraped the Internet without permission to build their product complain when something vaguely similar is done to them. Water still wet, sky still blue. Film at 11. (slibhb: Don't get me wrong, I agree with you 99%. But the frontier labs have zero moral authority here.)

I understand people just get off posting stuff like this. But creating LLMs from the entire corpus of human text was a huge achievement. Distilling those models is much less of an achievement. It means China is further behind than we thought.

How is China further behind if distillation cannot stop? I think it's a reasonable strategy to follow, even if they could train from scratch.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#52

Post by jarym »

levocardia wrote: post #27
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #17

This makes me very sad If Qwen and other Chinese labs are just copying reasoning traces, then those labs are more than a year behind the frontier.

It's been pretty obvious to me that the Chinese labs are operating mostly on a fast-follow strategy. The distillation attacks are well-documented, and there is good reason to believe they are able to copy architectural innovations as well. If US labs stagnate I would expect Chinese labs to stagnate as well. Their engineering is great, but in terms of frontier innovation (which requires heavy compute to search for new…

Japanese electronics started off the same way post-war.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#53

Post by [deleted] »

cristoperb wrote: post #40
c7b wrote: post #26

I wasn't aware that we have access to raw reasoning tokens? I thought what you get is a kind of summary. Does the author have some kind of privileged access or was my assumption wrong? But for the question studied here it probably doesn't matter - overlaps in the publicly available output may be indicative of distillation (or not), regardless of what it is. I would just find it surprising that the Chinese labs would…

They reference this paper which describes a method to decrypt reasoning traces (by sending the encrypted trace back to the model and asking it to transcribe it): https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf

[deleted]

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#54

Post by undeveloper »

amelius wrote: post #48
cristoperb wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They reference this paper which describes a method to decrypt reasoning traces (by sending the encrypted trace back to the model and asking it to transcribe it): https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf

Interesting, but I suppose that's a hole that can be easily patched.

patched with gpt 6

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#55

Post by undeveloper »

davyAdewoyin wrote: post #51
slibhb wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand people just get off posting stuff like this. But creating LLMs from the entire corpus of human text was a huge achievement. Distilling those models is much less of an achievement. It means China is further behind than we thought.

How is China further behind if distillation cannot stop? I think it's a reasonable strategy to follow, even if they could train from scratch.

distillation results in a worse product than the actual teacher model iirc

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#56

Post by 7734128 »

irthomasthomas wrote: post #44
7734128 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They would know the specific thoughts released by the "stolen thought" paper, which became part of the public internet on August 10. Unfortunately those are the only thought examples you can use to perform this experiment, as no other are availible. But as the model should have seen those specific examples, it's not a good signal that Qwen was exfiltrating thinking traces.

Has the method for extracting the COT been blocked, now? Otherwise why could we not generate some fresh samples?

I'm not sure how viable it still is. Perhaps it's still possible, and perhas that's exacly what they did in wtich case my objection falls, but I don't know.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#57

Post by cyanydeez »

wongarsu wrote: post #3

That writing style might be a tad too tense If I got it correct (appending B from https://stolen-thoughts.com/paper.pdf is essential) they are the authors of the well-known exploit to recover readable CoT from OpenAI and Anthropic models. They use that to find hints of distillation, by running a benchmark with a SotA model, recovering the CoT, then taking the first 1% of the CoT and running the open-source model as i…

they should call themselves real-time archaelogists: They dig up the past cause it's interest, but mostly meaningless and done by people with way too much funding for what they provide the rest of us with understanding.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#58

Post by Zambyte »

slibhb wrote: post #32
CamperBob2 wrote: post #9

News flash: people who scraped the Internet without permission to build their product complain when something vaguely similar is done to them. Water still wet, sky still blue. Film at 11. (slibhb: Don't get me wrong, I agree with you 99%. But the frontier labs have zero moral authority here.)

I understand people just get off posting stuff like this. But creating LLMs from the entire corpus of human text was a huge achievement. Distilling those models is much less of an achievement. It means China is further behind than we thought.

Distilling is a massive achievement. I can run Qwen. I can't run GPT (TM). It's not a matter of X is better than Y. It's a matter of Y exists, X does not.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#59

Post by 9864325789976 »

atomicnumber3 wrote: post #22
brcmthrowaway wrote: post #17

This makes me very sad If Qwen and other Chinese labs are just copying reasoning traces, then those labs are more than a year behind the frontier.

It makes me happy because it means that these misanthropic technofascists have no moat. They can spend trillions of dollars only for it to be largely copied in short order. Even if they weren't political adversaries of freedom, I would still feel 0% bad given all their training is already on data they got for free. Information continues to want to be free. To the benefit of us all.

Oh, we got a real rebel among us.

Re: Qwen 3.8 follows GPT-5.5 Pro reasoning prefills

#60

Post by noir_lord »

UberFly wrote: post #31
noir_lord wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd send them the worlds smallest violin but Rufus is getting in the way of me finding it.

I had to install an add-on in Waterfox to stop Rufus from following me around and interjecting every 2 minutes.

I'd already stopped using Amazon for geopolitical reasons but I needed to get something in an emergency the last week (family member in the hospital, so I bent the rule) first time I'd seen Rufus, even if I wasn't boycotting Amazon for other reasons that monstrosity would have made me consider it.
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