> It’s in the same neighborhood but isn’t really apples to apples. Distilling LLMs is to take a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation, while the other is scraping what already exists as is.

Hang on, why is scraping the public pool of knowledge not taking "a synthesized result that comes from huge amounts of innovation and computation"?

You think that that all those github repos that LLMs trained on, were not the result of innovation and computation?

How many years of human innovation and cycles of computation during compilation were involved in bringing something like GCC or LLVM to their current status?

Those LLMs trained on every single research paper available online - were those papers not the synthesised result of billions of dollars of research, effort and (importantly, for you anyway) computation?

LLMs trained on the collected works of every author in existence. Were all those works just "as is"?

> It is fair to say you stole our multi-billion dollar intellectual output in that scenario.

No, we didn't. We simply took the model as-is.