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Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

reuters.com

831–840 of 1001 posts

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#832
And all those reports of Claude when asked without a system prompt what its name was in Chinese it often would say Qwen or Deepseek, etc. I'd love Anthropic to say they aren't distilling and taking from every model out there, because I'm sure they are. As my mom would say, "the pot calling the kettle black." At least Alibaba and other Chinese companies are giving back to the AI community with detailed scientific papers on how their systems work and releasing open-weight or opensource models. I believe Anthropic has released nothing, and given that they had originally configured Fable to sabotage ML related work because only they can be trusted to do it safely, is just anti-science and anti-aligned with what I would consider good human values. They are way too sanctimonious and I don't trust them at all.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#833

“Distillation attack” are we joking here. If anything these models should be compelled to be public since they have been trained off public data. What an absurd overreach to call this an attack. It’s clear they are scapegoating national security and China at this point to build an anti-competitive moat. I generally really like Anthropic’s work and models but stuff like this scares me for the future. We are positionin…

> It’s clear they are scapegoating national security and China at this point to build an anti-competitive moat.

They are also fear mongering (and getting shills to as well) the idea that once open weight (Chinese) models catch up to Mythos we're all doomed. Maybe I'd be bit less cynical if they weren't prepping for IPO?

Wasn't OpenAI spreading similar FUD back when GPT 2 came out?

Guys... AGI is right around the corner. Pinky swear. Now buy our stock.

Keep in mind that the entire US economy is currently propped up by AI spending, so a lot of people (banks, government) are incentivized to make sure these companies succeed. Expect this propaganda to ratchet up a notch if / when the economy starts to nose dive.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#834

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything these models should be compelled to be public since they have been trained off public data I'm starting to come around to this idea TBH. For a while my position was: "these companies have invested billions into training these models, therefore they should be able to control them and profit off them" but looking deeper at where they got their training data, my view is starting to shift. IMHO I feel like…

labs invest multiple billion dollars a year each in private data, and that number is growing. internet training data is not where frontier capabilities come from, this view is outdated

Then it should be simple for one of the frontier labs to produce a model trained only on private data. We haven't seen that.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#835

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The compute deficit of Chinese Ai companies is real, and it IS THE ONLY competitive advantage that Western companies have. The only way the U.S. keeps that edge is to prevent distillation. The only way Chinese companies can make up for the deficit in compute is to distill. There innovation in great supply on every side of the Ocean. Its about the chips. And in terms of national security, for the U.S., and for China,…

> The only way the U.S. keeps that edge is to prevent distillation. For how long ? year ? how long till model that is year behind will be fine for 90%+ use cases ?

Putting aside agentic coding, that is to say, if you judge LLMs as a consumer technology (an old-fashioned idea for the inward-looking tech industry admittedly), then open weights LLMs, even quite small ones like Gemma 4, can likely already satisfy 90% of applications with a bit of help from search and browse tools.

Much of the arms race for better LLMs exists to satisfy only the IT industry's needs.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#836

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If anything these models should be compelled to be public since they have been trained off public data I'm starting to come around to this idea TBH. For a while my position was: "these companies have invested billions into training these models, therefore they should be able to control them and profit off them" but looking deeper at where they got their training data, my view is starting to shift. IMHO I feel like…

labs invest multiple billion dollars a year each in private data, and that number is growing. internet training data is not where frontier capabilities come from, this view is outdated

Okay that's fine, then make the law say they must provide publicly owned models off of publicly obtained data. To think that such a baseline of critical information isn't is the literal foundation of everything they will do, both now in the future, is just exposing what their end game is: control.

There no reason to not to otherwise outside of the poor little billion dollar corporations not wanting to provide a public utility they stolen from the public.

Anything that removes control from American big tech is a good thing for American citizens and the world writ large.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#837
post #807

“Distillation attack” are we joking here. If anything these models should be compelled to be public since they have been trained off public data. What an absurd overreach to call this an attack. It’s clear they are scapegoating national security and China at this point to build an anti-competitive moat. I generally really like Anthropic’s work and models but stuff like this scares me for the future. We are positionin…

The core of the training data is public, but the part that actually makes these models smart came from (pretty highly-paid) experts via platforms like Mercor. Claude didn't magically learn to write good code by reading all of GitHub - humans trained it in that, more or less manually.

So? What about the authors of all the works these companies stole?

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#838
post #807

“Distillation attack” are we joking here. If anything these models should be compelled to be public since they have been trained off public data. What an absurd overreach to call this an attack. It’s clear they are scapegoating national security and China at this point to build an anti-competitive moat. I generally really like Anthropic’s work and models but stuff like this scares me for the future. We are positionin…

The core of the training data is public, but the part that actually makes these models smart came from (pretty highly-paid) experts via platforms like Mercor. Claude didn't magically learn to write good code by reading all of GitHub - humans trained it in that, more or less manually.

If you pay me to curate a playlist of musical hits, can you now publish and charge people for access to that playlist (*including the curated material)? Can we do the same with movies? Books?

/edit Added a note to make it more obvious that the material is included in the playlist, just like the material is incorporated as part of curated AI models.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#839
post #813
post #807

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The core of the training data is public, but the part that actually makes these models smart came from (pretty highly-paid) experts via platforms like Mercor. Claude didn't magically learn to write good code by reading all of GitHub - humans trained it in that, more or less manually.

...and the rest of the training data (ie. the entire corpus of copyrighted works) was not written by experts expecting compensation? Double standards.

No, public data is not generally written by "experts expecting compensation".

By the way, I don't expect you to pay me for this comment. You can just read it for free. You're welcome.

Re: Anthropic says Alibaba illicitly extracted Claude AI model capabilities

#840
post #833

“Distillation attack” are we joking here. If anything these models should be compelled to be public since they have been trained off public data. What an absurd overreach to call this an attack. It’s clear they are scapegoating national security and China at this point to build an anti-competitive moat. I generally really like Anthropic’s work and models but stuff like this scares me for the future. We are positionin…

> It’s clear they are scapegoating national security and China at this point to build an anti-competitive moat. They are also fear mongering (and getting shills to as well) the idea that once open weight (Chinese) models catch up to Mythos we're all doomed. Maybe I'd be bit less cynical if they weren't prepping for IPO? Wasn't OpenAI spreading similar FUD back when GPT 2 came out? Guys... AGI is right around the corn…

Yes. They're turning on the consent manufacturing machine to make it an issue of "national security" to download some gguf file from Hugging Face. Absolutely disgusting.
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