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epolanskiyesterday at 11:20 AM1 replyview on HN

Okay, you have no data nor evidence nor a paper backing this claim, it's just speculation.

You want to sell me the idea they are spending hundreds of millions to get unchecked Q/As with reasoning redacted and without checks on the output quality to do what exactly?

Have a shallow pointless bunch of expensive data to get slightly better RL? It's expensive and pointless.

Data has shown again and again that synthetic input/output does not benefit models in RL, it may even make the output worse.

Also, you have a giant bias.

The chinese are the only ones releasing models and research papers in the open from which American labs benefit 24/7 (DeepSeek has been copied by all US providers).

And you want to sell me this ridiculous idea of the giant return of spending hundreds of millions on unredacted pointless QAs?


Replies

ACCount37yesterday at 11:22 AM

What the fuck. Are you a literal, honest to god distillation denier? Straight up "wake up sheeple, model distillation isn't real"?

I've seen plenty of things in the dumpsters of AI discourse, but this got to be among the most baffling.

Yes, there are "giant returns" on distilling from a more capable model into a less capable model. And even more so when the more capable model was trained for something you want and lack. Like: better coding performance.

Someone like OpenAI had to RLVR for it the hard way (and if you think "distillation is expensive", wait till you hear how many bits per rollout hardcore RLVR gets you), but you get to peek into the results of their work and copy them for yourself.

Also, Anthropic didn't redact model reasoning until Mythos. OpenAI started with o1, but Claude had reasoning chains accessible for a long time. Which is why Anthropic was more targeted than OpenAI.

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