The frontier labs distill their own base models all day long. It’s not just something done by nefarious Chinese copycats. The knowledge embodied by the internal base models that we never see is much more powerful and useful than the much sparser raw training data
>It’s not just something done by nefarious Chinese copycats
And even that would be rich as a accusation from SOTAs that depend on explicitly disregarding millions of training data intellectual property..
But how? The training data is the unadulterated content those models are based on? I genuinely don’t understand, no snark.
Raw training data is raw. A really big model trained on it has already done a first-pass of finding patterns and squeezing out redundancy. Re-ingesting the full training set to train a smaller model is probably more expensive, for marginal quality improvement over distilling from the large model.
I think you replied to the wrong parent.