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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. jedberg · · focus · HN ↗
          But if you take it deeper, didn't most of those authors rely on the work of others? Most of human knowledge is small advancements of things we already knew. Often by reorganizing what we already knew.

          Is that not what the foundation models are? A new reorganization of existing knowledge?

          1. wonnage · · focus · HN ↗
            quite the leap from “authors rely on the work of others” to vacuuming up the sum total of digitized knowledge to tune some matrices
            1. ryandrake · · focus · HN ↗
              Often people ignore scale. N=1 is OK, therefore, N=1billion is OK. Same flawed argument as: "It's OK for one police officer to watch one street corner for the purpose of observing crime; therefore it's equally OK to have cameras recording every street corner in the city 24/7, for all purposes. Same thing!"
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