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The AI Race Just Got Awkward

412 points · 463 comments · allisdust

  1. cmiles8 · · focus · HN ↗
    Why is it a problem that the Chinese labs are just distilling down Anthropic’s models? Aren’t Anthropic’s models not just distilling down other people’s work?

    Feels like Anthropic crying do as I say not as I do.

    1. jedberg · · focus · HN ↗
      What Anthropic is doing requires way more resources than what the Chinese labs are doing. So their complaint is that they do 95% of the work and the Chinese labs do the last 5% and call it their own.

      An argument can be made that Anthropic is also only doing the last 5% of the work (because the content they are training on was the other 95%) but that's a bit more philosophical.

      1. JackFr · · focus · HN ↗
        But the analogy still holds.

        The original authors of all the text, creators of the media and developers of the software did far more work than Anthropic.

        1. layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
          SOTA models cost hundreds of millions to train. Did creating the contents of the text corpus they were trained on really cost an equivalent of 20x as much (~10 billions)? I honestly don’t know, but I could imagine it having been significantly less.

          This isn’t meant as a moral argument, just musing about the relative cost comparison.

          1. phamilton · · focus · HN ↗
            Simple math:

            A training set of 15 trillion tokens is 10 trillion words.

            A penny a word is cheaper than the cheapest beginner freelance writer.

            That makes a training set of 10 trillion words cost $100B.

            Lots of assumptions there for sure, but we're certainly in the ballpark you are describing.

            1. ToValueFunfetti · · focus · HN ↗
              How much did you get paid to write this?
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