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Comment by stevefan1999

7 hours ago

Aren't Anthropic afraid of Elon siphoning the model weights out from the network buses?

Is xAI a competitor worth worrying about?

They make good models, at times SotA (at least if you don't need coding, their last good coding model was six months ago), with lower safeguards than either Anthropic or OpenAI, and they still fail to capture meaningful market share or mind share. The name Grok is tainted by the twitter bot of the same name operated by xAI/X. Being owned by Musk lets the company appear unstable and untrustworthy in the minds of many. Their marketing game is just bad all around. They struggle to retain top talent.

Maybe their next model will be great. I doubt it will matter. I doubt xAI siphoning off Anthropic models and distilling that would matter. Model performance is not the main factor dragging down xAI

Theft of trade secrets. And so many people will have to be involved that evidence of the crime is bound to leak out.

Pretty sure models are encrypted all the way.

  • Dude, Chinese labs distil attack via the APIs, if Musk wanted to do something like that, technically he could. Legally it would be a giant slam dunk liability though

    • Well, knowledge distillation requires a teacher model and a student model and the student model attempts to learn and extract and (preferrably) compress the information of the teacher model, so it is possible for model collapse due to high SNR in between [1].

      What I suggested is to steal the (possibly intermediate) weight in between by sniffing the network communication bus, which means MITM for getting the exact values. Or unless it turns out OpenAI or Anthropic leveraged homomorphic encryption, or I'm not certain how is Anthropic would safely allow Mythos to run on AWS without their control.

      [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knowledge_distillation

    • Distilling is different from "siphoning the model weights". I would think that Anthropic has a system for this. After all, they deploy to different clouds already. Their weights are worth billions, I presume that they take security very seriously and have done a lot of homework to trust no one.