Comment by ghshephard

6 days ago

Do any of the open weight models from smaller labs exist if they can't distill from the SoTA models that are throwing billions of dollars of compute into pretraining?

I’ve been wondering the same. And I think pretty much all the impressive small lab models were guilty of it, right? At least there is still larger players like DeepSeek and mistral to provide a bit of diversity in the market

Does it matter? The frontier models stole the whole internet, then the second-level models stole from them… It’s all theft.

  • Oh - I 100% could not care less regarding the morality/legality/whatever... Everyone trains on everything.

    I'm just wondering if the smaller labs see the same velocity of advances without SOTA models to generate Terabytes of training data?

  • The question is - if the SOTA model disappear - do these follow-on models have the ability to improve themselves without distillation?