Does anyone have hints on what kinds of prompts are most used for a distillation like this—SWE-Bench sorts of things?
Is reconstructing the compressed knowledge in the model like reconstructing a lossy JPG or MP3 a reasonable analogy?
Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
51–60 of 1001 posts
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#52Here'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…
>They achieve this by reselling capacity from pooled Claude Max 5x accounts, payments fraud, and also reselling the model output to various Chinese labs.
>Here's one token reseller, they're offering Opus 4.8 for a 93% discount below official API rates: https://yunwu.ai/pricing?keyword=claude
But is it cheaper than getting your own account? Otherwise this sounds like the "anthropic/openai are losing gazillions of dollars because they're selling $1k worth of tokens for $100" line that's commonly trotted out by AI bears.
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#53Notice how Anthropic is now scapegoating Chinese models providers like Alibaba and outright accusing them of distilling their models. Whether if it is true or not, this is part of their effort into using them as an example to scare everyone into getting congress to ban powerful models from being accessed outside of the US and also banning powerful local models from being released. Anthropic does not care about you, a…
I think it’s more than that. Piecing together the perspective of a few commentators in this post - it’s plausible Anthropic is trying to shift the narrative from US vs. Rest of the world to US vs. China.
In other words, they want to sell Fable or future more powerful models to rest of the world (presumably all future models are going to be more powerful than current gen). One way they can sell this is to the government is by scapegoating China (which is their primary concern anyway).
This is working on the presumption that non-US companies form a material portion of their current revenue.
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#54Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you need macbooks? Just rent servers from any hosting provider.
Not going to work for very long or at any scale coming from datacenter/hosting provider IPs. Google "residential proxies for sale" for the tip of an iceberg of how they snowshoe the traffic.
As long as you stick to a single unique IP per account it isn't going to get flagged.
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#55Earlier quoted context omitted.
Thats pretty crazy. This kind of thing jeopardizes Claude Max.
If Anthropic is selling a dollar for less than a dollar, they are running a business that doesn't make sense. That's what jeopardizes Claude Max, not this.
But if it's intended to be used by one person, it seems like breaking the contract by sublicensing it out to dozens of other people. It's like buying a netflix subscription for $15, then sublicensing it on a per-hour basis to dozens of other people.
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#56Reminds me a bit of the anecdote of Steve Jobs complaining about people ripping off the Mac GUI, in the mid to late 1980s, when he gave no public acknowledgement to the work done by Xerox on the Alto and Star operating system. "you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!" Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
[flagged]
The equivocation is crawling website crawling LLM responses.
Both Anthropic and Alibaba are trying to build bleeding edge LLMs. That part is the same. The way they source their data is slightly different, but they would both argue it constitutes fair use under Copyright law.
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#57Distillation 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.
One simplistic way to describe distillation would be to try everything imaginable and cache the response. But trying everything imaginable is hardly trivial
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#58Wait so they're upset that people used their IP to train a model without their consent or paying them anything?
or is this just about the token reselling?
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#59Distillation 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.
Im not so sure because we only seem to see distillation from China. What’s preventing tech companies from the UK, Germany, etc. from distilling Claude, GPT, etc. Do they simply lack the ability to?
Point being there may be no technical solution but there may be a political one (theoretically).
Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities
#60Reminds me a bit of the anecdote of Steve Jobs complaining about people ripping off the Mac GUI, in the mid to late 1980s, when he gave no public acknowledgement to the work done by Xerox on the Alto and Star operating system. "you're trying to rip off what I've already ripped off!" Crawl the whole Internet to build a gargantuan sized LLM and then complain you're being copied...
I think you meant a quote attributed to Bill Gates: "Well, Steve, I think there's more than one way of looking at it. I think it's more like we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
I don't know if that's a real quote from Gates, but I do know it was in Pirates of Silicon Valley.