Alleged Distillation Attacks by DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax

13 points by mike_kamau 3 hours ago | 7 comments

credit_guy
I don't think this counts as distillation. Distillation is when you use a teacher model to train a student model, but crucially, you have access to the entire probability distribution of the generated tokens, not just to the tokens themselves. That probability distribution increases tremendously the strength of the signal, so the training converges much faster. Claude does not provide these probabilities. So, Claude was used for synthetic training data generation, but not really for distillation.
exq
So it's okay when big American corps raid the internet ignoring any terms of service or licenses they see in order to train models they rent back to us, but when a foreign entity trains off of Anthropic it's illegal?
- riku_iki
  From the tweet, Anthropic's point is that distillation is Ok, unless new model has safeguards removed or used for military or surveillance purposes.
  dmonitor
  The fact that they're calling it an "attack" implies otherwise.
  I find the entire premise of this announcement absurd. Fraudulent accounts? They're just accounts. They paid for the access the same as any other. They're accessing Claude just like a human (or *claw) would.
  There's no argument against their strategy that doesn't make them complete hypocrites in respect to how they got the model training data in the first place.
  riku_iki
  > them complete hypocrites in respect to how they got the model training data in the first place.
  sure, hypocrisies is part of rules for big games: politics and business.
  > Fraudulent accounts? They're just accounts.
  they tell the story in blog post, that they don't allow claude in China, but those labs use some proxy services to access claude and mix traffic with regular users to hids its activities
  _aavaa_
  I don’t think so. It reads much more like “distillation is okay when you do it to your own models.”
saberience
Pot, meet kettle!
I don’t think I’m the only one feeling some schadenfreude at this news. I suppose it’s ok when you’re a hot Silicon Valley scale-up to slurp up the rest of the worlds data for free and then hire hot shot lawyers to defend you against all the creatives you ripped off, but when it’s the “evil” Chinese doing the same to you it’s a dastardly “attack”?