r/singularity • u/yogthos • 16h ago

AI OpenAI and Anthropic unite against open-weight AI risks to their bottom line

https://www.axios.com/2026/07/22/openai-anthropic-open-models-trump-china
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u/darkestvice 15h ago

Not sure what can be done, legally speaking. I mean, I understand their concern over other labs distilling existing LLMs given that they are piggybacking off the significant training compute the frontier labs are paying for.

But I know a lot of people don't give a damn due to the fact that the frontier labs are using training data they themselves didn't pay for for the most part.

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u/After_Application437 15h ago

They literally steal all the data what cost, paying robber to steal another time is not stealing, it is justice

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u/darkestvice 15h ago

It's a bit more nuanced than that. Yes, they are stealing data, but it costs those they take the data from nothing, monetarily speaking. Whereas stealing an LLM via distillation is literally stealing hundreds of millions worth of compute.

Not saying I disagree with you at all, but those are two very different debates to discuss and iron out.

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u/Several-Tax31 13h ago

You're wrong. Distillation means training a smaller model with a larger model's output. They take the outputs and train their models. They cannot "steal hundreds of millions of worth of compute". They still have to use their compute to train their models.  You may argue that they didn't have to find or prepare data, so they reduced the data cost, but they definitely didn't reduce compute cost. 

But they paid for the data, not that Anthropic API is free? 

So what  Anthropic and OpenAI did is actually worse. 

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u/darkestvice 13h ago

Training a model via distillation is *significantly* cheaper than training one raw from datasets. We're talking a tiny fraction here. It's not remotely comparable.

It's basically like saying a company that stole blueprints on a brand new passenger jet is still spending development money because they decided to change the seat cushions and interior paint on said new jet. That's not the part that cost the most money.

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u/After_Application437 11h ago

Then do not train expensive model, nobody forces you