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The reality is that American labs distill Chinese models, who are distillations of American models, just because the ToS doesn't allow American labs to directly distill each other. There needs to be a way for these labs to make revenue share agreements for distillation rights.
Bruh if the Chinese are distilling American models right at a cheaper cost? Hear me out. Why aren’t the Americans distilling their own models to make it cheaper?
Sriram Krishnan on why Chinese models can distill off American models but American startups can't: "First of all, every model we have today is distilled off of all human knowledge. If you go back to the original GPT or the original Claude, they all had to derive off crawling the internet, crawling off all of our blogs and tweets and content. They kind of consume human knowledge to bootstrap that." "I'm going to steal this from Dean Meyer of Sequoia, who had a fantastic post yesterday. The situation which is bad today is that some of these models from other countries can train off American models, whereas if you are an American open weight model, it may be really confusing or challenging on whether you can distill off of other American models." "We kind of have a really uneven ecosystem here, where if you're a Chinese model, you could probably get a bunch of reasoning traces. But if you are a new Valley startup and you want to use some reasoning traces, you don't know what the legal situation is." "If you look at any American open source model today, they are using Chinese models as a teacher, or in a way as a part of the fine-tuning process. How do we make sure that is protected and enshrined, so if you're an American model company, you have the same level playing field as the Chinese models?" @sriramk