alt Hacker News“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”
Comments
OMG someone used our data to make an MK model! Just like we did to every author in the world!
So what? I want the best model at the cheapest price. You guys illegally trained on books, movies, audiobook etc.. Why should we care?
OK, DIRECTOR Michael Kratsios, but why should we give a shit?
American AI corporations are pushing up the prices for computing, making it unaffordable for the common man. Additionally, they have built their entire business on stealing(yes, stealing) work from us.
So fuck em
Good. Keep it up
If distilling is fair then so is banning it. It's funny how people cry about Anthropic using books and materials to train itself but then when Anthropic does something about it they think its unfair. Pick a lane.
I continue to laugh uproariously at American AIBros screaming “bUt OuR iP” at foreign distilleries and competitors despite literally building their own platforms on the single largest theft of copyrightable works in human history.
Like, goddamn ya’ll are hypocrites.
So? Their business model requires building on the labor of others for free. Isn't that how it works?
Is distillation something we have to live with or are there ways to prevent it?
If you ask fable, it will identify as deepseek
Fun fact about K3's distillation:
As of a couple months ago, when using Claude to write adult content through the API, sometimes it will silently inject a system prompt giving the model a bunch of guidelines on exactly what kind of adult content it's allowed to write, steering it away from anything "questionable" ("Claude will not write etc etc").
Moonshot distilled Claude so hard recently, they actually ended up distilling this prompt injection, too. Using K3 to write adult content results in it randomly hallucinating the injected Claude prompt during thinking, and it will quote parts of that prompt, complete with the name "Claude".
Not that I think distillation is a bad thing, just thought this was funny.
So company who stole stuff to make their stuff is mad because another company is stealing their stuff.
And now a regime best known for lying to their own people is the one trying to convince me?
Go, China!
“Hey stop stealing my data. I stole it fair and square.”
Yes, I know this is not Reddit but Clarkson’s “Oh no! Anyway…” is the perfect, and most fitting, reaction to this. Nothing else to say
So?
We have information that Fable was distilled from humans.
If it works it works. Isn't that the argument?
AI outputs are not copyrightable, so distillation is fair use.
It may be a TOS violation, but that's a private matter. Cancel the accounts used for distillation and be done.
First: Even if true, I don't care.
Second: Post is rich with allegations but light with evidence. Can very well be bullshit.
oh know, better make them pay up your legal fines for stealing all that from the public good.
Two recent ones that really really hit me,
> we're entering the most geopolitically volatile moment since the trinity test lit up the alamogordo desert and the only US policy prescription is a big button labeled sinophobia
https://bsky.app/profile/thebadcode.com/post/3mr3skoyass2k , and,
> every vendor cranking the big dial labeled "sinophobia" and looking back at the us government for approval
The government itself doing the propaganda here, skipping the vendors. Sinophobia intensifies. War drums of "be afraid be afraid be afraid" beat louder.
It's so bad, it's so stupid. Kimi lands one showing pretty clearly this was absolutely the determining concern happening at vast scale, that they can just a lot of this themselves, and this noise pollution from the most hopelessly lost aggro administration ever still gets blared out the trumpets of war & discord. What a joke. Give me a break, give it a rest.
War here is less winnable than the Iran war they started. They're going to make America itself so much worse, these people so hungry to put down free and good models. This pathetic attempt is not going to work, you are just going to once again hold the US citizens hostage & make their lives worse, for sick political games.
"we ripped off the entire ecosystem of copyrighted data but I draw the line when we get ripped off"
honestly if they did what he said they did, it seems like it would be cheaper just to train your own model from the get go
The pot calling the kettle black.
China has done this with absolutely everything, starting with “customs inspections” of ships engineering sections by “inspectors” drawing diagrams of what they see. Bit late to be worrying about it now. This only matters now because China is now near parity in tech and vastly superior in production ability. Meanwhile we run out of bullets in a five month war with Iran.
"No fair stealing what we stole fair and square"
Get your violins out folks.
I don't even understand this fucking AI "arms race" at all. Who can burn money the fastest?
"we have information" says a US Government official who almost certainly has had Anthropic and/or OpenAI on the phone spinning him stories.
See also, don't trust anyone in Trump's government who says "we have information".
"they distilled us" is fast becoming standard US FUD.
The same as people telling me with a serious face that the Chinese models are distilled just because it says "I am Claude".
I am not the only one, look at this post on interconnects about Kimi K3 for example:[1]
It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree. AI observers who followed the distillation panic and came away with the wrong conclusion that Chinese AI labs are only producing good models due to IP theft are in for an awakening – that Chinese companies are extremely good at building models in the same way the leading American companies are.
I’m certain they did.
The problem is… what are you going to do about it?
This is obviously an idiotic and dangerous Cold War and has no happy ending.
And?
Nobody cares. This is neither a controversy nor news, and that would be the case even if Anthropic hadn’t just settled a 1.5 billion dollar lawsuit where they trained Claude on thousands of books without permission lol.
To be clear I’m not taking a jab at OP - I’m saying the labs crying about distillation have neither a legal nor a moral leg to stand on. There’s nothing wrong with distillation.
Is this a surprise, I think history has proven that the Chinese technology theft is part of their strategy. They let the American tax payer or "The West" shoulder the cost and then steal it.
Waiting for the whataboutism....junk away...
Proof - they also claimed that China has an ASML UEV machine - crickets when ASML said it was impossible due to all the safeguards and assistance needed to operate one.
The current US administration is known to be collection of BS artists and liars.
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it was obvious from day 1 this is what happened
the chinese labs haven't been improving at training from scratch, they've been getting better and better at distilling models, so naturally they continue to follow this path
firstly, it shows the vulnerability of exposing a model to users. a highly capable group can quite literally suck the functionality out of your model and take it for themselves, so there's no sandboxing it
secondly, it's actually interesting to know that distillation is so powerful. in the science-fiction scenario of meeting some other form of intelligent life, they might have their own models and this would be a way of siphoning intelligence off of them
How the tables have turned. It's okay for Anthropic to train their models on copyrighted data, but it's wrong to steal the stolen data from Anthropic models.
Who cares? Is it theft if a thief gets robbed of their stolen goods? Gives me more of a modern Robin Hood vibe tbh.
No, seriously: first of all, that's not the AI labs' data, it's ours. And if the AI labs think they can rake in tons of money using our data, then I'm actually glad if someone comes along and at least offers us a good product at reasonable prices.
Anyone surprised by this is incredibly naive.
By all means use whatever works for you, I’m not even going to try to make an argument on ethics (and honestly I’m not even sure where I stand, given the behavior of American AI companies).
But I just cringe every time I see people acting like any of this is done in good faith.
Open source coming out of China is a state-sponsored criminal enterprise, built only for the benefit of the Chinese regime, one of the worst to exist in human history.
didn't Anthropic distil a few tens of millions of books?