Comment by anon373839
13 hours ago
> These complaints of distillation are inflating the problem to make it sound worse than it is
Unfortunately, the Reuters piece itself is complicit in this dramatization. The lede paragraph parrots Anthropic's talking point that distillation is an "attack", without using quotes that would alert the reader that this framing is a corporate talking point. Distillation is NOT an attack.
Agreed! I had to do a double take and check the URL. I thought I am reading a press release rather than actual reporting.
That's exactly what they pay the publicist for.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13155538
ironically, I think this is why the jobs apocolypse is overblown, Ai is only good at a thing if the people using it are also good at that thing, and people are attributing Ai as superhuman at things they do not know themselves
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Same thing nowadays :^)
It always was.
> Distillation is NOT an attack.
From the article -
> 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts
wouldn't that be considered an attack? Not sure what I'm missing here.
An attack against what? The sanctity of "their IP" that is itself the result of a massive copyright violation campaign?
Has it been proved in a court of law that it is a copyright violation?
In some cases if the model regurgitates the original material then that is clearly copyright violation, but if the model "learns" from the source material just like a human brain would then that's not a copyright violation.
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even if you disregard training costs, pure inference costs are a problem same reason other api have rate limit. this is an attack to bypass the rate limit.
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It's merely a ToS violation.
My terms of service are that you are not allowed to breath oxygen.
I am getting a bit tired of companies being able to have user hostile, anticompetitive, monopolistic terms of service. The freedom we give them comes at the cost of the freedom as consumers to have free markets because they lock them up
Exactly, calling it “illicit” is funny. Your ToS isn’t law.
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That's violating TOS, spamming, possibly a DDOS, but the distillation in and of itself is not an attack it's just using the model.
Like the difference between scraping a site with one or two active connections vs thousands. It's not the scraping that is an attack, it is how they are going about it
> That's violating TOS, spamming, possibly a DDOS
As in distributed distillation of service?
Just sending a request to a service does not constitute an "attack". It seems that what Anthropic mean by "fraudulent account" is probably just one violating their terms of service - misuse of a subscription account, and/or the presumed nature of what the user was trying to do.
I guess Anthropoic would regard any developer using their subscription plan with OpenCode to be operating a "fraudulent account", maybe an "attacker" too. Now we know how they think of anyone using Claude to develop software competing with Anthropic. Only an "attacker" would want to vibe code their own harness, or god forbid want to learn how to build/train an LLM.
Of course Anthropic's wording is intended to be deliberately provocative, since they are trying to manipulate the US government into shutting down the Chinese competition.
Attack or customer
Is an attempt to copy all or parts of a model an attack, when models have very questionable copyright status? Maybe? I don't think most people have much sympathy here though.
Let’s not forget that by the same logic, Anthropic et al are “attacking” copyright holders all around the world by scraping their data unauthorized for training.
Pot calling kettle black.
Not only that, daily flooding websites with almost infinite amounts of request for ”web searches”. DDoS-by-VC money.
i mean, i got 5 replies in a minute of asking, and none deny it's an "attack", they simply say "good". HN should be better discourse.
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Distillation done via bulk automated activity of fraudulent accounts, in violation of a terms-of-service, can reasonably be called a "an attack" – specifically a "distillation attack" – even though distillation itself isn't necessarily an "attack".
This is similar to how compromising an account through bulk automated trials of many passwords is reasonably called "an attack" – specifically a "dictionary attack" – even though using a dictionary is not itself an "attack".
You shouldn't need to smuggle your sympathies (for the tactic or perpetrators) or antipathies (for the target) into peculiar judgy language prescriptivism against common, understood usages.… that then label Reuters "complicit" for simply reporting Anthropic's claims accurately. That's what Reuters is supposed to do, in a story about a letter Anthropic wrote!
Labeling it as an attack is smuggling sympathies. It is not common; there are only a small number of people who even discuss the concept. A company buying a product with the intent to reverse engineer or copy its features is likewise not an attack; it's just normal competition that benefits society.
The standard of neutrality that people here pretend to require from news organizations is not even remotely realistic.
It was a timely story from Reuters. They do fast news feeds, like APnews. Could it have been better or more accurate? Sure, they could have gone into why distillation may or may not be seen as "an attack". But then it would have been a more involved story, defeating the purpose of a news feed.
The Reuters piece was "good enough". Some other place like the NYTimes or WSJ can follow up with more detailed investigative coverage if it's a worthwhile story.
I don’t want or need fast and “good enough” news and i’m gonna try and make a case that you don’t either.
Until very recently, all of modern civilization was built by people who got their news at most once a day. Reputable bureaus like Reuters took that day to get it right.
I’m not the national security advisor, so I don’t need a push notification that there was an earthquake in Nepal, or a bullshit rush-job briefing on Chinese AI distillation tactics.
It's your assumption that they spent the day getting things "right".
Information just traveled slower back then
The fast part isn’t for your benefit, primarily, and news media would love to go slower and have more time if they could, and still survive. The race to break news first - in order to be the one to tell their audience something “new”, something they hadn’t heard elsewhere - is real and it has been around for all of modern civilization, for hundreds if not thousands of years. A one day turnaround was a thing purely due to daily newspaper print runs being the fastest distribution, it wasn’t because it was long enough to get it right. The reason they had a day is because the competition couldn’t get something out faster than that. Then for a while there were twice daily print runs to be more competitive. Then the internet came along, and now the only way for a site to get attention and be talked about on Hacker News is to report it before any other sites do.
There are some news media that do go slower and take their time, but I think they’re struggling to stay alive. Reuters is still reputable, but they no longer necessarily take a day. The big question is how do we get humanity to prefer slow & correct over fast, and it is even possible? When you hear about an earthquake in Venezuela, how do we stop people from Googling it immediately, and get them to wait for the best most correct story rather than reading whatever’s available now? In the case of natural disasters, I don’t think it’s possible anymore, no matter what case you make. I’m not sure it’s possible with stories like AI distillation either, even if you can absolutely cement the case for slow news. The fact that it’s async/internet now and that first still counts means we (you and I) are still going to give traffic and attention to sites that have the first information on a breaking topic, statistically, despite having a preference for correctness over speed. The one thing we can do is vote with our dollars by subscribing to whatever news media that does a better job than others.
Good enough slop to serve the masses. Doesn't need to be truthful because its fast? Why even both to write anything?
A cynical and bad faith response, why even bother to write anything?
Yes. It was good enough to communicate that news item.
Did Alibaba perform "an attack" or were they taking advantage of resources and going beyond Anthropic's terms of service? Didn't Anthropic do the same kinds of things when building their models?
These are all interesting questions, but they don't have to be addressed in full by a news blurb about a letter Anthropic wrote to some senators.
Money. More eyeballs on it means more ad impressions. Same thing with 24 hour news channels.
Distillation may not be an attack, but it is a ToS violation and could be seen as IP theft.
Any reasonable company would be pissed if a competitor, especially at Ali Baba's size, leveraged that company's R&D to compete. It is in this sense, a corporate attack.
If you want to roll your eyes at distillation concerns, you might need to excuse Anthropic for originally using pirated material to train their models.
What IP? It seems pretty obvious to me that it's not:
So what is "IP" here?
> you might need to excuse Anthropic for originally using pirated material to train their models
You have it backwards
More the opposite - companies who stole IP for their own benefit have no leg to stand on when others do it back. Personally I couldnt care less if Chinese labs rip off Anthropic. Its what America would do if they wanted to, for whatever reason (they probably do it right back secretly anyway).
Reuters is probably the most rigorous news agency in the world.
> it said was the largest known attack
> Anthropic said in the letter it was supportive of the U.S. government's efforts to combat the attacks
both times the word "attack" appears it's clearly stated that the word was used by the company, it's a direct company quote.
actually putting it into quotes would be editorializing
> Unfortunately, the Reuters piece itself is complicit in this dramatization
how would you feel if somebody quoting you would turn your word dramatization into "dramatization" because they don't agree with your assesment
> how would you feel if somebody quoting you would turn your word dramatization into "dramatization" because they don't agree with your assesment
This is exactly what news agency should be doing though. When the dude showed up to Comet Pizza to look for Hillary Clinton or whatever, do you figure they should've printed "Local hero saves children from predatory cabal"?
I want them to report the facts, not their opinions.
Reporting that corporate called it attacks is good. I do prefer direct quotes.
However, when they quote one word, the journalists are inserting their own opinion about it. I want to make my own opinions based on the facts. I don't need the reporter to draw the conclusions for me.
Well, let’s say you put the picture of some political figure, and put in highly contrasted red, bold large catchy font, "TERRORIST THAT KILLED MILLION PEOPLE", then below that in barely visible contrast, in tiny discrete letters, "is what this person probably will claim to be against".
This whole sentence technically will be correct, 100% guarantee, whatever this person actually even said or think.
From a propaganda point of view, framing the elements of language is even more important than what the statements actually states to be true or possibly true.
nice slippery slope you manufactured there - what if Reuters becomes Daily Mail
what framing are you talking about? they are literally quoting a company.
please explain what Reuters should have done here. Should they have added in parentheses: (editor note: we don't agree with Anthropic calling this an "attack")
Is that what you want? News outlets giving their opinion and moral judgement on company quotes? I mean, Fox News/CNN do have a large following, so there is clearly a market for that.
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Anthropic raped everyone without asking and stole their labor to build their career-commoditizing tech.
Distillation is Robin Hooding it back so that one trillion dollar company doesn't reap all the benefits of their automation of the workforce.
Distillation is Prometheus bringing fire from the gods to give to ordinary humans. Something we all own anyway, but that was kept from us.
Distillation is freedom.
Everyone should be pro-distillation. We should all work together to distill every proprietary model.
Anthropic stole. OpenAI stole. Google stole. ElevenLabs stole. Suno stole.
We should be able to get it all back.
And a number of Qwen variants are available to self host. Do Anthropic have any like that?
I'm more excited by open weights models you can't self host and need to spin up on H200s (RunPod or bare metal). This is where the real power lies and is where the open source world will trend.
It's far cheaper to spin up an H200 hourly or to simply consume a managed version of an open weights model than it is to use a proprietary hyperscaler API. And you own the model itself and can fine tune, tweak, lobotomize, etc.
The stuff you can run on your own RTX cards is neat, but it's rather hobbyist. The real power is in the cloud. Renting cloud hardware is fine, because the core problem is ownership of the weights, not the server rack or ISP fiber lines. Those are already commodity.
Big businesses will eventually run open weights models in the cloud, and it'll be a rather large part of the future AI economy.
Eaaaaasy now, the Chinese labs aren't freedom fighters on behalf the common man. They're not non-profits, they're not neutral transnational organizations only dedicated to open source efforts.
They're Chinese companies offering open source models now as loss leaders to keep themselves in the game because they know virtually nobody, especially in the corporate world, would contract with them and give them access to their data. They might as well just send a Dropbox link of all their sensitive data directly to their Chinese competitors, same end effect.
They're also doing it as the digital equivalent of what they've done in other industrial sectors for decades. Undercut and flood the market and once you've killed or severely hindered your competition, then you have the market cornered. The moment they can afford to these open source releases will stop.
Then the world will be stuck, just the way the world is largely stuck on rare earths. Instead of being able to regulate the leading companies from DC and Brussels, they'll be stuck watching Beijing call the shots.
That world would likely always have guys like Mistral and Trinity, but it's an open question if they'll ever catch up to the frontier.
And then Beijing will enjoy access to the data (ask any multinational operating in China for more than 2 seconds how useful contracts and Chinas legal system is for protecting IP), and these companies will roll in the money, and the Chinese supply chain will grow up behind the labs.
So, let's not pretend they've got the moral high ground. No. That boot just isn't on your neck yet. They're playing the long game -- and they're good at it.
I think most of us know why they're doing it. We are just very pleased with it regardless.
1. I get great products for nearly free 2. Anthropic/openai/etc will hopefully be destroyed since they stole everyone's work and are trying to capitalize on pure theft.
Win-win. The why of it is not really that relevant.
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The Chinese companies don't have to be open weights, and it's not all about competing with the west. For example, most of Ziphu's (GLM) business in China is supporting private on-prem instances rather than selling API access. They make money by selling support services - much like RedHat's busines model.
It doesn't matter why Chinese firms are stealing models and open sourcing them. The fact that they are doing it is a very, very good thing for basically everyone other than the people who paid to build the original models, but I've got no sympathy for them considering they stole all the content to train them in the first place. This is some kind of beautiful irony.
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you dont get it - usa is the goliath in all scenarios online. these are us based companies. most of the world would like to see them and the us fail.