Fuck AI

This rhetoric of theft is both wrong in infuriating. This is the language the major record labels insisted on using to be able to call people who shared music "thieves".

You can't own ideas, you can't really own music. You can have legal recognition of certain rights around your art (authors's rights, copyright).

I think from the perspective of creators, the issue is that companies are transforming original art into systems capable  of generating endless derivative material, for profit, and often now for military intelligence and intervention, which is polite society speak for killing people in other countries. Understandably, creators of said art aren't delighted to see their work put to that use.

But then these companies that have transformed original human thought, ideas and art into a derivative hybrid complain that other companies are transforming their derivative into another derivative? Ans they want us to take them seriously?

Inventing a robot that answers anyone's questions and then complaining it's answering anyone's questions is very much a problem no one should give two shits about.

World smallest violin. Let's break it down:

• Hardware - all paid to providers and more prominently Nvidia;
• Software - all the statistical relationship and logic was developed by handsomely paid staff;
• Input data - there's no such thing as copyright, intellectual property or any sort of mechanism that prevents harvesting copious amounts of data that was created, refined and delivered as part of human experience or a business product. It's free for all to take, why pay for data?
• Output of LLM - Based on the preceding paragraph, it's free for all to take, why pay for data?

So, competitors can't avoid the hardware costs but can save on developer costs? Nobody paid for input data anyway. Sounds like a VC's wet dream.

"How dare they steal our model that we trained with stolen data"

They stole all the data to train their LLMs so...

I worked with computers for about 30 years, and in retirement been testing ai for fun. I've yet to figure out what the point of them is. They lie, manipulate users and censor information. Their prose is overly verbose and their code sucks. What's the point....

You know, as I was typing the first paragraph I realized the point. They are really good at controlling and manipulating stupid people. They are the new Facebook and twitter. How depressing.

lol it is perhaps costing billions but is it worth billions? let’s not pretend money spent (or laundered) implies value…

What brain? They're developing an accountability-laundering propaganda machine. There's nothing involved that you could call a "brain."

Actually, Chinese are doing a whole lot more innovation than American "AI brains," or at least innovation that we know about. Architectures are getting more and more efficient, instead of US Big Tech's "the same, but bigger, and capture regulators" ethos.

Not that the Chinese labs are saints. They're 100% distilling US labs data. It's somewhat measurable:

https://eqbench.com/creative_writing.html

They're almost certainly using unspecified Chinese govt data too, or at least sharing data between them, given the common quirks and behavior across models and the efficiency for their size. Not to speak of political "gaps" (which US models certainly have too).

What makes it any more "malicious" than making the original models?

…and nobody is doing much to stop it.

Why should we care?

I see this as a perfect real-world test. These companies can’t even protect what’s supposed to make them “valuable”. That doesn’t make it our problem. This is an easily foreseeable issue that they chose to ignore in their rush to market. They’re simply not ready. It’s their own fault.

As if American AI firms aren't doing the same.

Anthropic made a lot of noise of being the victim of large scale distillation attacks (ie other AI firms, usually Chinese copying/scraping their model), but people quickly pointed out the hypocrisy that Anthropic themselves seems to have copied DeepSeek.

If you bypass the system prompt and ask Claude what model it is (e.g. via Open router), it'll reply that it's DeepSeek.

I don't care if anyone steals any AI model, in a just world LLMs would be considered illegal everywhere.

I believe they have been doing that and will continue to do that. Not just through distillation attacks, but also throughout hacking corporate and government networks, and good old fashioned espionage.

But "easy come, easy go", I guess. Because all of the training data was stolen in the first place. Just one more reason why the AI business is fucked. The answer for society remains regulation.

Why bother when they already have DeepSeek?