You could say that both of them stole, but different stuff.

Don’t forget that the Chinese models are also built on top of huge amounts of “stolen data” as well, beyond the distilled. So it’s basically all of the above. However, there’s no mechanism for the NYT or an author or anyone in the US to sue the Chinese companies that took their work.

and if you're an author that lives outside the United States?

You can't steal intellectual property, only infringe on the copyright holder.

The Chinese models poked and prodded better models for training data and to avoid having to pay humans to RLHF themselves. You can call it infringement, theft, whatever, but it’s quite obviously “not ethical” to me.

Looks like these humans' jobs got replaced by AI.