Proof - they also claimed that China has an ASML UEV machine - crickets when ASML said it was impossible due to all the safeguards and assistance needed to operate one. The current US administration is known to be collection of BS artists and liars.
alightsoul
how is it possible to distill fable only a month after its release? maybe they are confusing opus with fable.
superloika
I think they deserve, by Justice, to have their models pillaged and raped, just like they did to the internet. They didn't ask for permission when they took the entire of the internet, after all, and given their behaviour is nefarious, it's of Justice that they receive nefarious treatment by others, including chinese AI labs. The Chinese are not gonna deterred, but the posturing by the Americans is so blatantly hypocritical that everybody is cheering for their demise. See, for example, one of Francis Fukuyama's latests videos on youtube.
throwa356262
Kimi K3 was released July 16, Fable ban was lifted on July 1 but access was still limited. How did Moonshot "distil" a huge model in such short time and still had time to run the benchmarks and do the usual release thingies? I think Anthropic is desperate to stop foreign competition and the administration is happy to help because they too are heavily invested in these companies
traceroute66
"we have information" says a US Government official who almost certainly has had Anthropic and/or OpenAI on the phone spinning him stories. See also, don't trust anyone in Trump's government who says "we have information". "they distilled us" is fast becoming standard US FUD. The same as people telling me with a serious face that the Chinese models are distilled just because it says "I am Claude". I am not the only one, look at this post on interconnects about Kimi K3 for example:[1] It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree. AI observers who followed the distillation panic and came away with the wrong conclusion that Chinese AI labs are only producing good models due to IP theft are in for an awakening – that Chinese companies are extremely good at building models in the same way the leading American companies are. [1] https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k3-the-open-weights-esca...
kouteiheika
Assuming they did then they surely paid for them, which makes it "not stealing". Am I also "stealing proprietary U.S. technology" by harvesting my Claude chats from my `.claude` directory and training a bunch of models on them? That said, I doubt the "they distilled Fable" is the reason why K3 is as good as it is, considering the timelines involved, and that Anthropic hides thinking traces, and their overly aggressive "safety" filters. This constant FUD spread by Anthropic is so tiring.
Catloafdev
I wonder how they detect this kind of thing. Seems like this is going to be a perpetual issue until it stops being worth doing. Side note, didn't they stop releasing real thinking tokens for Fable? Or is it still part of some subs or API usage?
mattrighetti
Is distillation something we have to live with or are there ways to prevent it?
throwa356262
In the meantime, reddit is making fun of Opus for "distilling" Qwen: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1tqaist/opus_48... (don't take this too seriously)
feverzsj
If web scraping is legal, so is distilling.
bradfa
I can understand that the AI labs might care about other labs distilling their models as it can eat into their competitive advantage, but do consumers care at all? Aren't consumers benefiting from this practice by getting better cheaper models as a result?
tamimio
“If you can’t compete with them, get them banned” - US AI companies
m_ke
Anthropic should think hard about all their fear mongering. It will only end up backfiring on them and everyone else involved. They definitely used closed private saas products to train their own models, to prove that just drop random small screenshots of any popular product behind a login screen and see how well it's able to identify all of them. ex: https://x.com/michalwols/status/2079968211865330165 or other similar "AI" startups https://x.com/envconfig/status/2079613455296827402
mbix77
Didn't they just pay a fine for stealing all those books?
Geee
You wouldn't distill a car.
solumunus
Get your violins out folks.
HeavyStorm
Poor AI labs... All they hard earned training, done via scraping a lot of people works for free, now being scraped through payed subscriptions...
madduci
So what is the issue here? Distilling is still fair, on the same level like Anthropic scraped copyright protected material for their training. So here robbers are blaming robbers? These claims are just pointless, everytime
caycep
honestly if they did what he said they did, it seems like it would be cheaper just to train your own model from the get go
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Discussion Highlights (20 comments)
treetalker
rules for thee but not for me
tibbydudeza
Proof - they also claimed that China has an ASML UEV machine - crickets when ASML said it was impossible due to all the safeguards and assistance needed to operate one. The current US administration is known to be collection of BS artists and liars.
alightsoul
how is it possible to distill fable only a month after its release? maybe they are confusing opus with fable.
superloika
I think they deserve, by Justice, to have their models pillaged and raped, just like they did to the internet. They didn't ask for permission when they took the entire of the internet, after all, and given their behaviour is nefarious, it's of Justice that they receive nefarious treatment by others, including chinese AI labs. The Chinese are not gonna deterred, but the posturing by the Americans is so blatantly hypocritical that everybody is cheering for their demise. See, for example, one of Francis Fukuyama's latests videos on youtube.
throwa356262
Kimi K3 was released July 16, Fable ban was lifted on July 1 but access was still limited. How did Moonshot "distil" a huge model in such short time and still had time to run the benchmarks and do the usual release thingies? I think Anthropic is desperate to stop foreign competition and the administration is happy to help because they too are heavily invested in these companies
traceroute66
"we have information" says a US Government official who almost certainly has had Anthropic and/or OpenAI on the phone spinning him stories. See also, don't trust anyone in Trump's government who says "we have information". "they distilled us" is fast becoming standard US FUD. The same as people telling me with a serious face that the Chinese models are distilled just because it says "I am Claude". I am not the only one, look at this post on interconnects about Kimi K3 for example:[1] It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree. AI observers who followed the distillation panic and came away with the wrong conclusion that Chinese AI labs are only producing good models due to IP theft are in for an awakening – that Chinese companies are extremely good at building models in the same way the leading American companies are. [1] https://www.interconnects.ai/p/kimi-k3-the-open-weights-esca...
kouteiheika
Assuming they did then they surely paid for them, which makes it "not stealing". Am I also "stealing proprietary U.S. technology" by harvesting my Claude chats from my `.claude` directory and training a bunch of models on them? That said, I doubt the "they distilled Fable" is the reason why K3 is as good as it is, considering the timelines involved, and that Anthropic hides thinking traces, and their overly aggressive "safety" filters. This constant FUD spread by Anthropic is so tiring.
Catloafdev
I wonder how they detect this kind of thing. Seems like this is going to be a perpetual issue until it stops being worth doing. Side note, didn't they stop releasing real thinking tokens for Fable? Or is it still part of some subs or API usage?
mattrighetti
Is distillation something we have to live with or are there ways to prevent it?
throwa356262
In the meantime, reddit is making fun of Opus for "distilling" Qwen: https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1tqaist/opus_48... (don't take this too seriously)
feverzsj
If web scraping is legal, so is distilling.
bradfa
I can understand that the AI labs might care about other labs distilling their models as it can eat into their competitive advantage, but do consumers care at all? Aren't consumers benefiting from this practice by getting better cheaper models as a result?
tamimio
“If you can’t compete with them, get them banned” - US AI companies
m_ke
Anthropic should think hard about all their fear mongering. It will only end up backfiring on them and everyone else involved. They definitely used closed private saas products to train their own models, to prove that just drop random small screenshots of any popular product behind a login screen and see how well it's able to identify all of them. ex: https://x.com/michalwols/status/2079968211865330165 or other similar "AI" startups https://x.com/envconfig/status/2079613455296827402
mbix77
Didn't they just pay a fine for stealing all those books?
Geee
You wouldn't distill a car.
solumunus
Get your violins out folks.
HeavyStorm
Poor AI labs... All they hard earned training, done via scraping a lot of people works for free, now being scraped through payed subscriptions...
madduci
So what is the issue here? Distilling is still fair, on the same level like Anthropic scraped copyright protected material for their training. So here robbers are blaming robbers? These claims are just pointless, everytime
caycep
honestly if they did what he said they did, it seems like it would be cheaper just to train your own model from the get go