In praise of distillation. We (@kuhhbin) argue in @TheEconomist this week against efforts to ban Chinese models trained in part on American ones.
OpenAI and Anthropic may dislike distillation, but:
— Price competition is good for the ecosystem
— Paradoxically, distillation may be good for national security, both in propagating US developers' safeguards on cyber/bio risk to Chinese models, and in keeping China in fast-follower mode
— The US developers' own IP claims here are pretty flimsy, since distillation isn't all that different to the 'fair use' defense they're using for the training data they hoover up.
https://t.co/suRLpdoGUT