alt Hacker News> But the real question is: Is it okay to steal
By definition it cannot be stealing since you're paying for the tokens. It may be against their ToS, depending on what you end up doing with those tokens, but it cannot be stealing. If they charge by the token, all your tokens are belong to you :)
I also find it very strange that everyone sort of accepts their ToS like no big deal. Imagine MS using the same terms for their software - you cannot use any MS software to develop competing services. Bananas! They'd be dragged through the courts like it's the 90s.
(I get why they're doing it. Distillation is unreasonably effective. But still, I find it bananas that we've kinda accepted it, to the point where people use "stealing" or "attack" or any such terms)
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It's like sideloading. It's very hard to fight against the marketing budget of big tech
> If they charge by the token, all your tokens are belong to you
I’m not sure this argument is correct. You can sign whatever contract you like with the model provider, right? Including “you are entitled to the end product but not the intermediate scratch work”?
Coming from a place of genuine curiosity: is there some precedent or statute that would invalidate that contract? I don’t see why the reasoning tokens belong to you.
For example, I pay lawyers by the hour but don’t necessarily own their meeting minutes, recorded discussions, research notes, etc.
I hesitate to nitpick with regard to something legal, given your username, but what makes this different from hiring a consultant with the agreement that their final output belongs to you, but you don't get access to their internal processes, tooling, notes, etc? Or a photographer where you get final edited prints, but you don't get the raw photos?
I love how some of the biggest advancements in llms came from the Chinese labs, yet people still jump to distillation being unreasonably effective. Distillation is very good at creating smaller models from large ones sure, but nothing to me indicates it is 'unreasonably effective' compared to all the other bells and whistles being iterated on