I’m not arguing for anything, actually. The ‘fair’ ship has sailed, even if the pirates somehow get shut down (which would be suicide by USG, won’t happen, national security issue), open Chinese models are not even hiding the fact that they distill from the frontier US labs, thus benefiting indirectly from the stolen content.
Note I don’t particularly like the ‘stolen’ word here as I don’t like when the music and film companies use it in the same context. Copyright infringement? Sure. Theft? No.
> I don’t particularly like the ‘stolen’ word here
Except that's the standard that we've measured everyone with up until the LLM/generative tech boom. I don't see why the benchmarks should change now. I realise my argument doesn't move reality but that doesn't mean we shouldn't call a spade a spade. Said companies carried out theft (or copyright infringement if you prefer) at industrial scale which is far more reprehensible crime against humanity than anything the individuals we think of as "digital pirates" have committed.
> open Chinese models are not even hiding the fact that they distill from the frontier US labs
The difference is they return to the same system that they feed from (indirectly); people get access to model weights even if the entire model isn't open source. The same can't be said for OpenAI, Anthropic, Google etc (who also benefit from Chinese models and train on them).
Sure, the alternatives aren't a panacea of fairness but I'd much rather advocate for and support the thieves who give me a better deal if my choice is limited to thieves. Especially if thieves aren't hostile to their customers like Anthropic is (which is why I replied to you in the first place).