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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. jonhohle · · focus · HN ↗
            If you look at movies alone that would easily surpass 10s of billions. The cost of most books is probably more nebulous, but books, research, and more all have time and money spent to create them. I would guess the corpus of all media from the 20th century on would be minimally in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
            1. layer8 · · focus · HN ↗
              LLMs aren’t trained on movies, though.

              Image/video models are, but those weren’t the topic.

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