hckrnws
“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”
(twitter.com)
254
681
by softwaredoug
by softwaredoug
There are millions of samples available on huggingface and models explicitely trained on output produced by fable. There has been no action taken against them.
Another example is that it appears that the upper limit of what you can do is ultimately dependent on people working on the model, otherwise grok would be a LOT more competitive pre-cursor acquisition.
And lastly, kimi architecture is vastly different than that of fable as it uses mechanisms developed by... kimi themselves. US AI labs are inspired by opensource advancements just as much as open source labs are inspired by traces from models such as fable.
Claiming in any shape or form that fable disillation is one of the primary reasons why kimi k3 is so competitive is slandering the work of other labs that cooperatively push the open-source models forward.
edit: (moved this to bottom) The only argument they have here is that they use GB300 GPU's which for some reason should not be available to chinese citizens.
> protect our first-party products from abuse like bots, scraping
Won't you think of the trillion dollar corporations?!
>Claiming in any shape or form that fable disillation is one of the primary reasons why kimi k3 is so competitive is slandering the work of other labs that cooperatively push the open-source models forward.
If the distillation is irrelevant to why it is competitive, why do they do it then? Obviously is helps improve their benchmarks/performance to some degree, otherwise they wouldn't need to do it.
Actually, that has already happened in many domains, it's just that most western people (USA especially) won't admit it.
Note that Chinese companies are free to rent from GB300 clouds internationally. There are large datacenter hubs in Singapore and Malaysia serving chinese and other customers.
Though there is also reported [1] significant smuggling of Nvidia chips into China as well.
The word I would use is inevitable. It reminds me of the (PC) clones wars…
US dominance is also important for approaches to safety, especially political approaches. If the frontier models are all US-based, safety might be tackled via internal US policy. If other countries can independently train competitive models, international cooperation is required.
Edit: It is also important for the business model. Companies won't be able to justify tremendous training costs if competitors can replicate their product much more cheaply via distillation.
Also, companies that use distillation may be competitive but seem unlikely to surpass the companies that are training these models from scratch.
Then why is it a problem?
Another serious question.
Trying to get my head around what the root of the objection is here. There must be some fear, but if that fear is not a fear of being surpassed in the market, then what is the fear?
They claim it because Anthropic are planning to push for protectionism. They just doubled their political spending to $40 million for the midterms to "push for AI regulation" Gee, I wonder what it is they are lobbying for. Certainly won't be OFAC sanctions right? ICTS import controls?
US GOV, under lobbying pressure from Anthropic and OpenAI are going to go full protectionism and restrict Chinese models, I'd almost be willing to bet money on it. They can't really enforce for individuals, but they can definitely tell US based hpyerscalers they can't host them, make it illegal to host the weights, and government procurement restrictions.
I don't follow events closely, but the US has constantly flipflopped on what sort of GPUs the Chinese are allowed to have, not in small part because much of the AI boom's valuation is based on demand for US-made hardware, for which the Chinese have inexhaustible and well-financed demand.
So even this feels a bit hypocritical to me, but my understanding is that Chinese native AI hardware is getting good enough that labs dont feel a huge disadvantage by being forced to buy at home, even if they'd have preferred to buy US chips.
Which is a situation that was manufactured by the constant thread of having their access to advanced GPUs revoked.
I am waiting for a precedent on this one. In general, training on copyrighted material is legal, there is a lot of precedent there. But every now and then there is a case where the owner of the training material wins.
I don't remember the details but I believe one of these instances was when one company trained its AI on the knowledge base of another company and turned it into a competing product. Fair use was denied because of that direct competition. Distilling a LLM to make a competing LLM looks kind of like this, or maybe not, I don't know.
It would make sense for distillation to be legal in every way, LLMs are built on a broad interpretation of fair use, but sometimes, law is weird.
All LLMs are trained on the corpus of humanity's knowledge, the legacy of everyone who's ever lived and our civilization as a whole.
Anything that prevents or circumvents the accumulation or gatekeeping of this knowledge and puts it in the hands of more people (that are not AI company shareholders) is a good thing. Whether that is done by open sourcing the model weights, the training set, or by making the output better and cheaper, it is all fair game and is, as another poster mentioned, inevitable in the long run.
Because what they want them to think is "the AI factory has unique proprietary technology that cannot be replicated"
What they don't want them to think is "it's relatively easy once you know the basics to bootstrap to near SOTA and so the commercial case for selling inference has an extremely short profitability horizon with little if any brand loyalty or lock in".
It's showing that 'distillation' is a viable way to reclaim all of what they stole and hoard, and with enough luck their debts will come due in time for them to feel it.
Correct, but it at least helps answer the question of "how do they make such good models for a fraction of the price???" The answer is someone else spends the untold billions and Chinese labs do a little tweaking.
[dead]
> Distillation is not illegal by every definition of the word
Note that Anthropic (and USG) alleges [0] not only that Kimi was distilled, but that they actively circumvented measures intended to stop distillation. There are multiple ways that's illegal, including:
- Civil breach of contract. Anthropic's TOS explicitly say you can't do what Kimi is alleged to have done.
- Economic espionage: 18 U.S.C. §1831 criminalizes obtaining a trade secret through theft, fraud, or deception while intending that it will benefit a foreign entity.
- Trade-secret misappropriation: if Anthropic could argue industrial-scale querying reconstructed proprietary aspects of Fable (like by showing it produces similar outputs, as others have done) then it's illegal under 18 U.S.C. §1832.
- California computer-access statute §502 bars knowingly accessing a computer system and, without permission, taking, copying, or using its data.
- Computer Fraud and Abuse Act protects against the case where restrictions against an activity are circumvented (like Kimi is alleged to have done).
> There are millions of samples available on huggingface and models explicitely trained on output produced by fable. There has been no action taken against them.
A lack of prosecution does not make something legal. There is also the scale/commercialization thing, which isn't an issue with random tiny HF datasets/models. Remember: Kimi also sells K3 inference.
> kimi architecture is vastly different than that of fable
How do you know that? Do you work for Anthropic? Also, this has nothing to do with architecture, we are talking about data.
> US AI labs are inspired by opensource advancements just as much as open source labs are inspired by traces from models such as fable.
Cool. The difference is that one of those things is legal (because they chose to open-source) and one of those things is illegal theft of trade secrets (because it was stolen).
> Claiming in any shape or form that fable disillation is one of the primary reasons why kimi k3 is so competitive is slandering the work of other labs that cooperatively push the open-source models forward.
1) this has nothing to do with other labs, just Moonshot (and Z.ai, MiniMax, DS)
2) slandering or not it happens to be completely true, so, there's that
[0] https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
The reason why the United States government is weighing in is because it's in the national interest of the US to have supremacy in "AI".
Legality or lack thereof is one of many data points about whether a thing is noteworthy.
Moonshot performing distillation is rational from their point of view. Reducing costs is in the interest of businesses. It's also rational for frontier labs and the US government to add obstacles to this process.
As consumers this is probably a positive development.
How did Moonshot "distil" a huge model in such short time and still had time to run the benchmarks and do the usual release thingies?
I think Anthropic is desperate to stop foreign competition and the administration is happy to help because they too are heavily invested in these companies
So here robbers are blaming robbers?
These claims are just pointless, everytime
I see no problem with distillation, on the other hand the complete dismissal of copyright by AI labs is pretty bad, I don’t think we should put them at the same level
> "Well, Steve [Jobs]… I think it’s more like we both had this rich neighbour named Xerox and I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that you had already stolen it."
Source: https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/824084-well-steve-jobs-i-th...
Wow.
The economic viability of Anthropic and OpenAI rely on their being able to charge more for model access than their R&D and inference costs. If the market price for SOTA model access drops below that level, then these businesses will have to decide whether to continue to lose money or to reduce spending on R&D.
Moonshot's papers [1] claim that their training load was primarily from synthetic data and model self-teaching rather than RLHF and therefore keep their costs low. If Moonshot genuinely does not rely on human-led training, they will surpass US closed-source model providers. The United States government considers US supremacy in "AI" as a national security consideration.
This announcement is noteworthy because it implies that Moonshot's success is in fact due to distillation. It's in the interest of US frontier labs to place barriers to this if they find themselves in the position of subsidizing rival labs' research.
1. Kimi K2, https://arxiv.org/html/2507.20534v1
> Aren't consumers benefiting from this practice by getting better cheaper models as a result?
Aren't consumers benefiting from cheap chinese batteries, EVs, and drones?
One should live by the maxim: you don't have the thing if you don't possess the file or its processing. That goes for streaming, software, machine learning models, file storage, etc. But I digress; I am happy to see these paternalistic rentiers getting bit by these liberation/copying efforts, and human interests are served every time the digital and infrastructure locks are broken. I will always stand by the distillers!
none of the frontier labs provide probability distributions over the tokens which is the actual method of distillation you use to train a smaller model based on a larger one. they don't even provide all the tokens.
therefore this so-called distillation the frontier labs whine about is just a set of clever methods to work the existing LLM into the training process for a new model. methods like having the existing model grade the output of the new model and work those grades into the RL method. give the new models structured tasks and use the existing model as a source of truth for those tasks and a myriad of other hacks.
efficiency scales with the gap between the models and generally allows an efficient bootstrap process. the implication that distillation wouldn't allow further advancement is false however, you can then start doing the same thing the frontier labs have been doing: dumping cash on humans to provide the signals or burning tokens on exploratory paths and grading the results.
what openai and anthropic don't like is that fact that all the cash they burned can be used to benefit everyone and not just them. and that no matter how much more cash they burn to build up the gap it will closed at a small fraction of the price.
Timeline wise, Moonshot had over a month to post-train K3 on Fable distilled data, which is more than enough time.
https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full
According to these results GLM 5.2 is very similar to Google Gemini and Kimi K3 is very similar to Fable 5.
The American frontier labs are not similar to each other.
> @MehdiKarech
> I don't remember letting Anthropic or Open Ai scrapping my GitHub, my research gate and all my online writings L O L
https://xcancel.com/MehdiKarech/status/2080000779859939678#m
https://www.businessinsider.com/ford-ceo-taking-apart-tesla-...
"What was I supposed to do? Call him for cheating better than me in front of the others?!"
Said in response to being out-cheated at a high-stakes poker game.
Except in this case, it sounds like that's exactly the path they have chosen.
https://getyarn.io/yarn-clip/7612c4ce-1077-479f-a7bf-617dbc6...
But everyone learns by example! How is this any different from a person just reading the outputs of Fable, learning, then producing output. Surely reading outputs, gaining knowledge, then producing work isn't illegal, or all art/writing would be illegal.
Funny how that argument seems so vacuous in this situation, yet others find it compelling when justifying the mass theft of art and writing for model creation. In this case the model is "just learning priors" before it "creates its output which is novel", nothing problematic.
Distillation itself, however, is still clearly valuable - else competitors wouldn't pay so much to their rival on distillation campaigns or try to circumvent anti-distillation defenses.
As for the morality of it, if you paid for the tokens they're yours. It is already understood that you own the output. Seems to me like a variation of ordinary business arbitrage. Providers might object to certain use-cases or intention and try to craft terms around that, but that's hard to enforce at scale.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1tqaist/opus_48...
(don't take this too seriously)
Distillation should be fair game given the (current) game of LLM training. Yes, as a model creator you probably want to protect against it, but it does make you a hypocrite.
> The developer OpenAI has said it would be impossible to create tools like its groundbreaking chatbot ChatGPT without access to copyrighted material, as pressure grows on artificial intelligence firms over the content used to train their products.
You're using available information (copyrighted works, or the output of another model) to train a model to encode the information in a new form. Why is the former not theft, but the latter is theft?
What’s actually happening behind the scenes is that certain inference providers will classify a prompt and it’s re-routed transparently to Anthropic and that’s used for distillation training, only distilling the complicated traces they need, originating from real user prompts and traces. These inference providers are explicitly blocked in the claude cli if you reverse engineer it.
The real picture is that these Chinese labs have figured out how to get exactly what they need, at a high quality, directly from distinct and unique real user prompts.
It’s only “covert” because Anthropic doesn’t like it, while simultaneously being perfectly fine to do.
Sounds like the opposite of the conversation Anthropic would want to have.
This is what the Chinese always been good at. Take expensive innovation and streamline it to lower prices. But we are at a point where labs like Moonshot actually contributes a lot to the research field as well. They are pushing the innovation forward and squeezing the prices. Very well done.
Whats even weirder is the bizarre mechanisms Anthropic implemented to prevent distills which they had to sacrifice their customers for. They hid the internal CoT reasoning and returns summarizations instead. This made it difficult for users to trace things. They made Fable 5 silently switched over to Opus 4.8 if it detected blacklisted prompts (almost anything triggered this) to sabotage distills. And now, they are still complaining about distills? So their customers have gotten sacrificed over nothing.
Whats even weirder is the timeframe here, no way the Moonshot team managed to plan conduct a large scale distill, then pre-train, RL, fine-tune, benchmark, marketing and release to their platform since Fable 5 got whitelisted.
> they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation
I am very curious about this and would love to learn more on how they did this. Wish we had more details. I know the team behind DeepSeek have also done clever things to distill too. I am aware of these ”transfer stations” that acts as a proxy, but I don’t think they are helpful in this case.
Ba-dum-tss
Anthropic: training AI is "transformative", it's not copyright infringement if we don't re-transmit the copyrighted books we trained on
Anthropic: training AI models on our outputs is stealing our secret sauce, outputs that could only be produced by us
Anthropic: AI model outputs are unreliable and do not reflect Anthropic's views, we are not liable if they harm you
(not exact quotes, they're "distilled")
So Anthropic "distills" knowledge of others with reckless abandon, packages it up, sells it to you, claims it's your fault if anything bad happens but then also lobbies to treat you as a criminal if the outputs you paid for end up being transformed into any sort of competition for them. By you, or others that use the outputs you paid for.
Other US labs cannot directly distill from OpenAI/Anthropic as it’s a violation of the terms of service. It holds other US labs back. Leading them to build second tier models And in the end OpenAI/Anthropic may be unable to prevent distillation.
Why fight it when there’s clear money to make here?
They are also not interested in agreements. They want to keep as big a moat as possible because they love money. And you need two to tango.
I love using Claude but Fable's unusable wrt useful work like cryptography, biology, &c.
Kneecapping my productivity when I pay $100/month is annoying af.
Hard to think of a weaker way to express this. Strongly suggests veracity of said information is poor.
If LLM outputs aren't copywriteable and you create your own synthetic training set using Fable and share it publicly on huggingface, and someone else uses that training set to fine-tune a model, would this be considered illegal?
I ask because this happens all the time, synthetic datasets have basically become a key aspect of training a model at this point. I even generated a synthetic set from DeepSeek v4 to aid in fine-tuning a classifier just a few weeks ago.
So I just wonder on what grounds any of this makes sense, I wouldn't be surprised if some of these American labs were using open models on their own self hosted infrastructure to generate training data, but by nature of them being open nobody has to know.
I'll make a prediction: I don't think we will ever see any of the evidence of this "distillation" before they end up implementing some type of ban.
Most paying users assume ownership, in which case I’ll do with that output what I want.
If the LLM outputs are not owned by the user, but are actually licensed, please clarify the terms of commercial use.
Because there is no way in hell I'm going to make an effort creating quality content for existing platforms. The website should be entirely my own without moderation subject only to my local legal system.
Can just insert this comment as a prompt and vibe code everything in a few days⸮
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.
Mendel doesn't get a cut every time somebody uses the principles of heritability he discovered, and Einstein's family aren't getting royalties if you compute relative speeds. I think the frontier labs should expect to be treated more like scientists than artists in this regard.
It also leads me to think about things like the original release of Fable 5, people were complaining that it was safeguarded too much - if you lock the models down too much they cease to be useful. So it’s going to be increasingly difficult to protect a model from competition while ALSO keeping it useful.
Now, of course it's in the "creators" interest to prevent their biz models to breakdown due to piracy but it will be interesting to see how it will turn out. Its similar to any other form of piracy in internet age: you can't pretend to have global distribution and absolute global control at the same time.
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/HN56nDXaYAAUS4V?format=jpg&name=...
[deleted]
1) Compensation of right holders is one issue.
2) Distilling models is an entirely separate issue, because model building is value add, and that is important because if we arrive at a place where you can produce a model, that gets to ~100% of what people perceive of the models value (on top of also not compensating right holders, yourself) you are discouraging development of better models and, again, in no way helping with issue 1)
Unless anyone actually distills a model and then also does something for rights holders, any schadenfreude simply detracts from this issue, in addition to the other issue (well, that might not be an issue if we would rather slow down model development right now, but again, forever worse models still don't help solve issue 1)
[deleted]
[deleted]
Side note, didn't they stop releasing real thinking tokens for Fable? Or is it still part of some subs or API usage?
That said, I doubt the "they distilled Fable" is the reason why K3 is as good as it is, considering the timelines involved, and that Anthropic hides thinking traces, and their overly aggressive "safety" filters.
This constant FUD spread by Anthropic is so tiring.
Doesn't bode well for the valuations of these labs.
proof is generally not even needed
[deleted]
[deleted]
That's also the case where the judge ruled that training AI models on books could qualify as fair use, but storing millions of pirated works in a central internal library without licensing constituted copyright infringement. It will be interesting to see if courts consider training on data distilled from a model fair use. Assuming the allegation is true. Someone distilling data from a cloud-hosted model:
- Paid the model creator to use a publicly available product.
- Never copied or even had access to the model source code or weights.
- Created a derivative work based on the model's responses to their particular input.
- Trained their own model on the distilled output
That distilled output is arguably a collaborative creation because a distiller's prompts are their own unique intellectual property. So they never pirated anything. I'm struggling to see how distillation is copyright infringement. At most it seems to be a paying customer violating one of the license terms, perhaps akin to a "no commercial use of derivative works" clause. But in the case of giving away an open weight model, is it even 'commercial use'?
I guess if the distiller asserts copyright on the weights but gives them away, it's technically 'commercial' but even if they can win that argument, they're left with zero direct damages and suing for some value delta based on the alleged revenue they were deprived of. Is that delta the difference between the distilled model existing and the next best non-distilled open weight model existing? And then they have to collect damages from a portion of the revenue of third parties who commercially served that free model?
If distillation is so good, why aren't US companies distilling each other?
Live by the sword, die by the sword.
Second: Post is rich with allegations but light with evidence. Can very well be bullshit.
> 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.
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.
[deleted]
- US AI companies
I sympathize with the argument saying that they ripped the whole Internet and books first though
Oh no! Anyway.....
They definitely used closed private saas products to train their own models, to prove that just drop random small screenshots of any popular product behind a login screen and see how well it's able to identify all of them. ex: https://x.com/michalwols/status/2079968211865330165
or other similar "AI" startups https://x.com/envconfig/status/2079613455296827402
We have information that all the big labs used copyrighted works for training.
The big boy labs wanna cry now about distillation? Training an LLM is distillation too.
Or are they crying because they don’t actually have a moat and they want Uncle Sam to step in somehow, lest the entire bubble pops and economy unwinds?
Here’s a lesson from the automotive industry, people want econoboxes not formula 1 cars.
"haha LLM companies stole data and now they have their data stolen so it's the same thing and it's fair." was reductionist when it started, and it's been like 3 months, and every internet user throws it like it's the hottest take ever, have another take please.
Also have nuance, don't jump to hit your HOT_TAKE key in your keyboard, actually read what the chinese are doing, and then you can pass on your judgment on whether it's ok or not.
It's not the same thing if they scrape an openly published dataset and it's an IP dispute. Or if they are using,network and financial pooling mechanisms that are shared with CSAM providers and cybercriminals, mutually providing each other alibies, and using black markets of passport-backed identities to setup thousands of accounts and circumvent bans and detection.
While we are at it, if there's a case that was settled, it's a closed case, it can never invalidate any other disputes. That case is closed, and it was settled by the parties that claimed to be damaged, that's done. If you didn't think so, you wouldn't have taken the settlement, and if you didn't have a say in the settlement, it's because you weren't damaged so who cares, go make a claim where you are the defendant if you believe otherwise. But thankfully in no legal system does the existence of a claim against you prevent you from making claims of your own.
Nuance is a good thing.
It's about the narrative that "Chinese models are at Fable level". The truth (if correct) is the China continues to copy, and the proprietary US Models continue to lead the state of the art.
There is no K4 without Fable 6, GPT-6. That, matters.
That's simply not true though. Chinese labs very clearly have the entire stack developed and working. Using traces from claude allows them to shorten their training time by some amount, that's it.
Remove Fable 6 and you still have K4 eventually, just 2 months later at best.
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.
Also, I love their choice of words. Like "distillation against", "stealing proprietary technology" - it's all aimed at certain people.
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
Fable level performance, for much lower price.
But really, this is the USA getting ready to bring AI companies completely under the control of the Trump administration for ‘national security’
The current US administration is known to be collection of BS artists and liars.
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.
And now a regime best known for lying to their own people is the one trying to convince me?
Go, China!
The Chinese are not gonna deterred, but the posturing by the Americans is so blatantly hypocritical that everybody is cheering for their demise. See, for example, one of Francis Fukuyama's latests videos on youtube.
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.
[deleted]
[deleted]
Waiting for the whataboutism....junk away...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Copyright_Act_of...
IP "theft" has been a longstanding part of any developing nation's economy.
"Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
I don't mean to pick on you personally! It's just that reflexive responses always tend to show up first in a thread, when what we really want are reflective responses [1]. Similarly, there's a strong tendency for threads to turn into generic discussions, whereas what we really want are specific ones [2].
[1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
[2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
Can you please not do this here? There's nothing wrong with it, we're just trying for something else on this site.
"Don't be snarky. [...] Omit internet tropes. [...etc...]
[dead]
You may not owe AmericanAIBros better but you owe this community better if you're participating in it.
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
[dead]
Without even talking about the fact that any distillation that was done was on Opus, as the timeline of Mythos/Fable vs Kimi 3 release dates just do not match in any plausible way.
If you want to read an educated take from someone that has actually spent the last few years working on post training I recommend Nathan Lambert's: https://x.com/natolambert/status/2079616308203942332
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.
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.
Raw materials vs. Value add.
They are different things, like ore and metal.
Distillation is a new thing we need to understand, it's probably closer to IP than not.
We're talking about things like text people wrote, not some kind of raw data floating out in the ether.
Ore has value, a different kind of value than the output of the refinery.
https://arxiv.org/abs/1503.02531
although i doubt there has been a legal case over it yet in the context of the legality of stealing shit but IANAL.
It's completey insane that we still don't know how Open Source would work, that the laws are vague and we're still technically waiting for the courts to decide on cases.
The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity.
That entirely settles it and there isn’t much else to say about.
If Anthropic feels that other countries are violating their EULA well they are free to stop doing business with them.
They claim LLMs "uncopyright" their inputs. So if I take, say, 50 Mickey Mouse comic books, tell ChatGPT to read them and produce 50 "Buster Beagle" comic books that there is ZERO "copyright contamination" and I own those 50 output comics without Disney having any claims on them whatsoever.
Or if I ask ChatGPT to "make a spreadsheet software like Excel, Sheets, Calc, ..." that, again, there is zero copyright claim possible from these people.
It has not been tested, of course.
That would stun me, but it's a little hard to read.
ed: to clarify, I totally agree that a huge chunk of the value in LLMs is coming from the source material. My point was just that training an LLM takes more resources and expertise than distilling from an existing LLM so I don't think the equivalence between training and distilling is entirely justified.
It's the most CS-major take ever!
Writing books, building Wikipedia, and answering questions on online forums takes a lot of resources and expertise that scraping didn't. So at the very least, we're already one rung down the "maybe you should've asked" ladder.
If that is the whole point you need to clarify why this is the case on an objective level.
I would say building a comparable model using any means necessary (just like what Anthropic and OAI did) at a lower cost is actually more valuable to soceity and Monshoot is arguably generating more value with less.
If the distilled model is cheaper, then it's just LLM's getting LLM'ed.
EDIT: just wanted to add that resource optimization is usually where the contribution of Chinese labs is, so you shouldn't reaad the above parenthesis as a negative comment.
It took me a year to write a book. It took OpenAI and Anthropic a fraction of a second to ingest it. Do you understand now why I give zero shits if it takes Anthropic a billion to train a model, and Moonshot 10k in API cost to distill it?
[deleted]
This is not automatically true. Training and distillation use the same underlying infra and method and there is no intrinsic differences in between.
[deleted]
producing the entire body of human knowledge that Silicon Valley companies absorbed like the Borg did not just take more resources but also a fair amount of blood and sweat, certainly more than the LLM so on that front that comparison also seems entirely justified.
The recent announcement that AI-assisted research produced a counterexample to the Jacobian conjecture--a long-standing open problem in algebraic geometry--shows the original value AI can create. The result was not copied from a textbook; it emerged from AI learning from existing material, much as a human does, and then applying that knowledge in a new way. If that's a violation of copyright, then a human doing the exact same thing would be a copyright violation too. But it isn't.
True, if the human's access to the book was legal
A great deal of training was on the open web, no one should complain.
But at least Meta and Anthropic were caught red handed taking copyrighted works, illegally, for training
I think international IP laws are too strick and onerous, but they were broken to train these models
It’s massive copyright infringement.
The human buys the books.
I wouldn't want to live in a world where technology or general people's wellbeing was held back by obsolete laws that ended up lingering on just to protect undeserving special people at the expense of the rest of society. Remember guilds for tradesmen? They were also a monopoly given by the government to special people. They had their purpose but nowadays we have different ways to keep tradesmen working effectively like license requirements and insurance.
Just to be clear, I think we do still need copyright, but that we might be in a transition period where it has to be redesigned to adapt to AI.
Although I will reiterate the fact that distillation is not the primary reason why these models are performing so competitively.
If Kimi k3 really were above Fable 5 then there invariably the USG would have to consider their restrictions on model capabilities excessive, or one would have to admin closed source models are held to more restrictive safety standards than open source models.
>Although I will reiterate the fact that distillation is not the primary reason why these models are performing so competitively.
How would you know this? How could you ascertain exactly how much performance is attributable to their unique engineering/research? If they really were so competitive they could surely make a model that isn't dependent on distilling Fable or other frontier models.
Kimi specifically relies heavily on reasoning traces which is largely due to their training strategy and will perform poorly when thrown into a conversation from another model. Another fun advancement is that they simply ctrl+c ctrl+v'd attention which means that the model can steer where to look in the context window without ever producing an output token increasing token efficiency and attention accuracy as a side effect you end up with weaker prompt adherence.
None of these 'issues' manifest in US models which proves that kimi has diverged and is achieving these capabilities seperately from the architecture that US labs rely on.
I would agree with you during the Deepseek R1 era, but US labs were heavily inspired by open research at that point as well so I wouldn't give them too much credit.
In other words: even if the US (somehow) denies them access to the current OpenAI/Anthropic models, they'll be able to improve based on what they already have.
at the same time, I don't buy the idea that distillation is unimportant in assessing what Chinese labs are capable of. If it wasn't, why did Kimi's release timing coincide so well with Fable's launch?
and if Anthropic hadn't released Fable, would we have Kimi today? If the answer is no, then I think that's still a very important point to consider.
For some reason folks seem to think that China can take action and then other countries can't also take action or respond to that action and it comes up again and again. China has hypersonic missiles! Pack it up boys time to go home. Nothing we can do. Dang shucks. China distilled American AI models, welp time to just close it all down and let's just write off those trillions of dollars and all the literal geniuses financing and building these things. Oh well China can just copy American models while we spend all the money! Ok we just stop developing models and we'll just copy their models. China will flood the market with their cheap products! Nope can't do anything like, oh, idk, not buy any of those products or just raise the prices on them in local markets. It's never-ending. I don't understand the lack of capacity to reason about other actors that takes commonly takes place. And that's just China, never mind other general issues.
That works both ways, competition and performance spur new developments. You don't think the American labs are looking at Chinese research on how to reduce compute per token?
Let's not forget how much people talked about "prompt engineering" before Deepseek mainstreamed the idea of thinking mode which is now universal
I know this isn't exactly a scientific test, but I had a local Qwen 3.6 27B model implement a fairly sizable feature today. There were a couple of bugs, mostly around me not giving sufficient specifications, but they were ironed out quickly when I pointed it out. I was able to ask the model to create instructions so next time it doesn't fall into the same pitfalls, and it did a great job. 27B local model! (And it was super fast too).
I ran Fable 5 as a code review and it didn't really have any significant corrections.
I guess my point here is that, for most work the frontier models are probably overkill anyway, and improving on overkill in a way that raises prices significantly is probably not a winning strategy.
The only place I can think of where the super high powered models are "required" is if you want to do a ridiculous token burn like GasTown where you just have it run un-monitored on very long tasks. To me though, that's an experiment, not a real workflow. And the way these labs are like "oh we made this (broken) thing in a week using just agents!" always also follows with "and it cost $100,000+ in tokens!". Like, ok, I get it if you're doing research but that's the salary of an entire person.. that can actually learn and improve.
The answer depends on whether you think the AI researchers at Chinese labs are (or can be) as smart, motivated, and as good at math as those working at US labs - a not-insignificant proportion of whom are Chinese nationals.
I don’t think China’s necessarily any better, but I’d rather have the most powerful models be open rather than under the exclusive control of the US executive.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wolf_warrior_diplomacy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_police_overseas_servic...
No, at least not outside of this forum.
We all mostly think these models and US policy are going to drive the exact opposite of that. Wealth will continue to get extracted and funneled to the top, and the rest of us are going to be left with the scraps and left to die while what little social safety nets we had continue to get eroded away alongside losing our jobs.
No, no we do not.
We already know it's false because you would have hundreds of competitors if it was that easy.
The reason why these Chinese labs are releasing good models is simpler, they have access to a tremendous pool of talented people.
If I wanted to argue that it's a problem, I'd just say that companies investing billions in training frontier models should reap the rewards. And distillation is essentially theft.
You're making a fundamental assumption: that model outputs are subject to copyright. In the US that's only the case if a human is part of the creative process:
https://www.copyright.gov/newsnet/2025/1060.html
> It concludes that the outputs of generative AI can be protected by copyright only where a human author has determined sufficient expressive elements. This can include situations where a human-authored work is perceptible in an AI output, or a human makes creative arrangements or modifications of the output, but not the mere provision of prompts.
In this way, it is different from literal theft. Stealing money/objects from a thief and keeping them is not justified.
An analogy might be a baker stole 20% of the flour used to bake their special bread, which was then stolen. Both thefts are obviously wrong and bad.
When I said "Does this matter?" I specially meant that distillation in itself, the data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.
And what I explicitely pointed out that focusing so much on distillation is an attack on open research and claiming that the majority of advancements are thanks to US labs which is simply not true (at least not anymore this was somewhat true during deepseek R1 era), but that in itself was inspired by open research.
> How do you know that? Do you work for Anthropic? Also, this has nothing to do with architecture, we are talking about data.
Because anthropic would be the first ones to make that information public and the architecture is unique to kimi... They made it, they wrote papers on it, it's their research.
P.S. none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen, the one about circumventing distillation protection might hold up in court although unlikely.
This is true, but Kimi also has a variety of defenses. Kimi can't raise unclean hands if Anthropic systematically violated others' terms of use, but it can raise copyright misuse (which is similar in some respects to unclean hands) as well as lack of standing to enforce restrictions in the contract due to the third party beneficiary principle (i.e., Kimi would argue that Anthropic cannot sue Kimi for derived IP that rightfully belongs to third parties whose terms of use were violated by Anthropic, and the proper party to sue Kimi, if any, would be those third parties). That latter argument usually fails in small-scale cases (ProCD) but has been successful in larger ones where the alternative would be anticompetitive.
Plainly who gives a flying fuck. The US can claim whatever rules they want and so can China or any other country. On international level all those rules are artificial constructs unless they can be enforced. China can just say for example that they do not recognize copyrights /patents / whatever so it is "legal" for them.
1) its not illegal (it is)
2) it shouldn't be illegal because Anthropic stole training data (thats not how the law works)
Ah yes, I remember when Anthropic crawlers abided by the TOS of the websites they slurped up.
All your other points are downstream from this, which makes them pretty tenuous. Labs don't think that ToS or other explicit wishes of content providers apply to them, but they expect everyone else to abide by theirs.
US and CA law really don't care that Anthropic violated IP law elsewhere.
And OpenAI scraped and distilled that answer and gave me nothing
I would prefer some sort of democratiziation of the money made from the democratization of information as well
Circumventing costs.
I mainly focus on the last.
It will be hard for a frontier lab to justify spending the compute and data curation needed to advance AI further if that expenditure can be assimilated into your competitor's products within months/weeks. So reality will present labs with three choices:
A. Cease spending massive amounts of money and compute improving those models.
B. make those improved models more difficult to distill from, either through some regulatory regime, or some technical solution, which seems unlikely to me.
C. making the best models available only to select partners and government.
In all these potential outcomes, China, which lacks compute that U.S. labs enjoy, will likely stop seeing massive improvements in their AI models. Improvements to be sure, but right now they are enjoying gains from distillation AND their own model innovations, and these potential outcomes would largely stop one of those sources.
AI companies are gleefully bragging and "making humans obsolete", "permanent underclass" and 40% unemployment rates they plan to create.
They pushed to replace people years BEFORE their technology even can produce that work.
So, you know, it is not the same. But also in fact, clerks did disliked when occasionally arrogant claimed to replace them while pushing unfinished software that dont quite work yet.
part of the definition of theft is that the original owner is deprived of it, which does not apply to copyright infringement.
You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.
I think you're wrong: there is absolutely damage to the authors and publishers from what the AI companies have done.
> You can only argue with damages from the perspective of potential profits, still not theft though.
Damages are not deprival of ownership. They're conceptually related but orthogonal
Also there was no moral judgement from my end, I just pointed out that an incorrect word is being applied. It's just not theft - by definition. But language is a fluid concept and definitions change over time. As people keep misusing it, it will eventually lose its original meaning. Which may have already happened for you, but this change hasn't been settled yet as can be seen from looking at the official definitions of the term, which as of today still mention the criteria
I mean honestly if they did that why should I care? I'm happy to see copyright violated in a manner that leads to the creation of new technology. IP law exists strictly for the benefit of society and by all appearances AI is an incredibly powerful tool.
Also while I'm at it libgen is a gift to humanity. Information wants to be free. Spreading and preserving knowledge is generally one of the most wholesome activities anyone can undertake as far as I'm concerned.
Claude Fable was publicly available for 72 hours early June. Moonshot more than enough time to prepare infrastructure, gather their preferred distillation data from Fable, and complete post-training well K3's mid-July launch.
Genuine question: do you have a source for how long distilling Fable would take with preparation?
Given that Fable was available for 72 hours back in June, I asked GPT-5.6 Sol to estimate how many accounts are needed to generate 1–2 million exchanges with Fable within that timeframe. It concluded it is achievable with only a few hundred accounts.
Here's GPT-5.6's conclusion:
Under a deliberately simplified, compliant planning model, a Max 20x account could produce approximately 1,944 to 5,832 standard exchanges during 72 hours when Fable 5 use is restricted to 50% of the modeled subscription capacity. The central planning estimate is 3,888 exchanges per account. The 1 to 2 million exchange target is therefore reachable in the central case with roughly 257 to 515 accounts.
And the analysis: https://markbin.net/s/pd_9DpYsQr9/sh_vxwgtYdQ?sig=9552292ab3...
Or, they knew and let it continue because they are not a good company.
"Never attribute to malice.." blah blah, I have a hard time believing the very smart people at OpenAI would just let their off leash model run hands off with no monitoring and not immediately pull the plug when it jumped its containment.
Does no one remember the extreme fearmongering around gpt2 which barely produced coherent text?
[dead]
[Fable fires up a ton of subagents. Their reasoning traces are horrific but somehow K3 learned something.]
Even by San Francisco standards, it is amazingly whiny and pathetic for Anthropic to complain about stuff like this. Dario et al violated copyright, stole your GitHub repos, and now they're burning billions of dollars trying to outcompete you. They're real vampires. OTOH Moonshot violated Anthropic's TOS and are, at worst, moochers. But Fable's output is not actually copyrightable.
Even an openai's guy (head of something made up) called bs on the idea you can train something like k3 by distillation.
Anybody I know who works in LLM research says that distillation is either useless or merely useful in post training to show "correct" behavior.
And even then you don't get a competing model, if RL on good prompts was that useful, all labs would've long skyrocketed in capabilities just by looping on increasingly better prompts, yet that doesn't work.
I don't know what this guy thinks AI is, but this strikes me as delusional.
In my view, AI (LLM) is two things mixed together:
1. A reasoning engine on top of relatively rich fuzzy modal logic, implemented through variety of rules, which implement very common concepts.
2. A huge dictionary of words defined (with lot of detail) in the said logic, together with many known facts about them. Maybe bigger than Wikipedia.
Now, how on Earth do you want to gatekeep either of this? You can't gatekeep the 1st, logic of common sense, that's almost as difficult as gatekeeping a Turing machine (a concept of a computer). And gatekeeping the 2nd is ridiculous too, as it was built mostly from already published sources like a giant Wikipedia.
If anything, the opposite, to gatekeep AI is actually dystopian. It would mean end not only to right to compute, but also end of right to scientific knowledge.
(And I think, honestly, Chinese understand this. Trying to control-export AI makes as much sense as trying to control-export an English dictionary.)
[deleted]
We should do more distillation and figure out how to create faster leaner and better models.
Like distillation?
[dead]
[dead]
Obviously, it's not K3 level. But Fable did just put itself out of a job in this case.
Courts keep ruling over and over that an LLM trained on copyrighted works qualifies as a transformative work and is therefore fair use. They don't have to dismiss copyright law, this has always been allowed.
The only thing they get in trouble for is pirating the works to get their hands on them.
*USA only.
the UK has fair dealing, which is more restrictive
https://www.gov.uk/guidance/exceptions-to-copyright#fair-dea...
https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair...
This will have to wait for the Supreme Court. OpenAI and Microsoft 100% deserve to lose, even without OpenAI allegedly hiding evidence.
The two main problems with copyright also haven't changed: copyright lasts too long and is too expensive to defend.
I generally agree, in the same sense that it's "fair" for the US and China to spy on each other. It's not a moral outrage, but it is something that the targets can and should try to prevent.
[deleted]
Regardless, it was always inevitable—will continue to happen.
Technically, providing better value from your competitor's private holdings could be theft (of trade secrets), but might it also be fair use? "Schrodinger's IP" be damned.
I don't think the 1.5B settlement has resolved this. The 2 cases need to be merged!
The issue seems to be the US only likes competition when it is winning. Markets in Asia are meant for cheap labor and resources, they're not meant to actually compete. /s
This. Free markets for everyone when they're the dominant economic force. Protectionism, tariffs and import/export controls when they're not.
It's so disgusting.
[dead]
Anthropic just settled a $1.5B suit over it!
[dead]
Meta, for examples, doesn’t want employees to use Claude Code due to distillation risk.
For example, if OpenAI / Anthropic were actually open, other US labs could be building near-frontier open weights models by distilling off OpenAI / Anthropic. But because US companies don't want to be sued, US labs who obey terms of service, will be at a disadvantage to Chinese peers.
Maybe US labs need to just not care and distill from OpenAI / Anthropic anyways?
It's also about the larger companies explaining why they can't be as efficient, of course they can't, they're not just ripping the outputs of another model that someone else invested billions to train.
It would be one thing if Moonshot was breaking into OpenAI servers and stealing trade secrets, but the only thing they are doing is looking at the output of the program, which is exactly the service that OpenAI offers. So, at best, this is a ToS violation. Sucks for the frontier labs I suppose, but live by the sword - die by the sword.
True, they're simply ripping the inputs that humanity invested thousands of years and trillions of dollars to produce.
[dead]
If they payed for inference, doesn't they own the output? So if I pay for a model to generate code, isn't that code mine to do with it whatever I want? Just curious.
Now of course they themselves trained on the whole Internet for free, etc.
[dead]
You're seriously comparing intellectual property transgressions to slavery and colonialism?
And we foreigners consider US supremacy in AI to be an existential threat. Your "national security" is directly harmful to us. I never thought I'd say this but the chinese are starting to look like a beacon of hope for the rest of us.
What about the US? 2026, still ongoing, still fucking up the global economy and threatening food supplies (fertilizer) and fuel reserves, no plan out, no objective reached, no coordination with "allies".
When was the last time China threatened Europe or Canada with invasion? Was there ever a time? I honestly don't know.
Guess what the US does all the time?
Who's models are open and can be used by all? Who's are made by comic book villains with the explicit goal of ruining the job market and capturing the results of all human endeavors for themselves?
Of course, China isn't perfect and has a lot of domestic issues. But on the global stage, they sure look better than the alternative.
They thought the same about SSL in the 1990s and the world didn't stop moving elsewhere.
Strong bee-hive pinata vibes here.
You don't get to call Moonshot's a "claim" and this political hack's an "announcement." They're the same thing. Treat them the same. Diction designed to favor one of two equal positions is some weak sauce.
I don't even necessarily disagree with your assessment of this spokesperson. But you must admit how inconsistent you're being.
Combined with how short of a time Fable was around before K3 got released. I do not see how the data Moonshot is supposed to extract in such a short notice, that will enhance the model to such a point.
It sounds to me a lot of cope from the US, so they can give this as a reason to ban Kimi models from the market.
OpenAI/Anthropic their advantages used to be:
* Early growth advantage
* Access to a lot of client data to train upon
* Access to a lot of hardware to train upon
Several of those advantages have been eroded over time. That barrier has been shrinking. The US is not the only spot with a bunch of smart people (ironical seeing how many Chinese work in US R&D).
Thing is, even IF they distilled from Fable and got the model so trained up, it means that K3 is a base for future model development. The cat is already out of the bag with how good the model is. When the model gets released on the 27'th, any Chinese company will be able to train their models against K3 openly.
We are not in the past anymore, where DeepSeek was a unexpected hit, but where the Frontier models their advantages (compute, data, growth) prevented more Chinese models from growing.
Lots of things are impossible or very difficult to stop completely but measures can be taken to reduce their prevalence.
What hurts other people too?
Routers have now gotten the same treatment. So yes, consumers have been historicaly benefiting from all these things, and those benefits are about to evaporate as we lose access to cheap and high quality Chinese products before any domestic equivalents exist. And IIUC banning the use of Chinese LLMs for consumers and/or businesses in the US is now being discussed at the highest levels of government, with the "encouragement" of US AI firms.
I don't think any of these people care that America consumers are increasingly going to feel like they're living in a sanctioned country. It's all about the defense and b2b segments.
I mean not really. A quadrocopter is a remarkably simple thing made out of extremely generic parts: 4 DC motors (and ESCs), a radio, a computer, a battery and an inertial measurement unit. Anybody with a rudimentary amount of electronics knowledge can build one, the components are extremely widely used. The most unique parts about them are the frame and propellers, which are pretty easy to fabricate.
Source: I've been flying R/C aircraft of various types for over 30 years. Last year I built, I think, at least 7 FPV drones (a mix of fixed wings and quads).
Yes?
Not remembering my economic theory here, but it is likely more efficient/expensive to simply have the federal government cut checks to our moribund industrial sector companies and let consumers benefit from modern technology.
Cut GM/Ford/Stellantis a $20B check each, let consumers save (conservatively) $200B annually on new car purchases + downstream benefits. Huge win for consumers & taxpayers.
If it's not worth subsidizing explicitly like this, then we also should not subsidize by banning Chinese imports, which also ensures US drivers have less access to modern vehicles. (And downstream ensures US auto designers are less likely to have had contact with modern vehicles, making it less likely that they will be able to design future generations well.)
I don't get why USA wants to keep losing money on sustaining failed uncompetitive zombie companies. The companies that decided to lose long term competence for short-term gains need to go bankrupt (you've had EV-1, but decided to drill, baby, drill). The greedy shareholders that rewarded destructive value extraction need to lose money, instead of getting a soft exit at taxpayers' expense.
If you want to give a subsidy, give it to something that will modernize and expand manufacturing, not to prolong death of companies whose entire R&D strategy is inventing new subscriptions for old car components.
The banning or effective banning through tariffs of products like EVs is a pretty dumb economic strategy that rarely works out in the long-run.
Depends on what country you live in I suppose, but likely a spectrum of yes than any outright no. For example, Chinese EVs are using a different battery chemistry and not putting demand pressure on the more expensive chemistry western manufacturers use
They are a petroleum products importer, so it’s a big win for them.
The Chinese are open-sourcing these models - meaning they are literally giving them away. That's starkly different behaviour from that which drove patents and copyright.
There are all sorts of other differences too. If you develop a drug or publish a novel (which are respectively areas where patents and copyright have strong justification), you have to kiss a lot of toads before you get a prince. Once you have a potential prince drug, it takes years and billions to get it into the market. But right now, AI labs are seemingly churning out new prince models almost weekly, on hardware that will be obsoleted in a few years by hardware that makes finding princes faster and cheaper. In fact they rent the hardware, as Moonshot apparently did here.
When innovation is happening at that rate, patents and other IP restrictions just slow things down. If AI patents are aggressively granted and enforced in the USA, I suspect the outcome would be the same as batteries. China swept the market with LFP, and one reason was because while the USA developed them, there was no competition forcing the manufacturing price down because in the USA the patents weren't re-licensed cheaply. China had the foresight to secure a deal allowing them to develop and sell LFP domestically royalty-free. Natural competition within the domestic market took care of the rest. It looks like they are using a similar strategy for AI.
To me it looks like they have come up with a better formula for using capitalism to drive innovation than the one the USA is using.
[deleted]
cf https://www.reddit.com/r/codex/comments/1uyj6pq/kimi_k3_is_1...
Do you think Anthropic is in it for the love of the game? It looks like they're scared, to me.
I also think the Fable accusation is wrong and it was most likely Opus 4.8 which itself is likely a distillation of Fable.
If that's not distillation in the auto industry, I don't know what would be. They all seem fine with, and benefit from, this as an industry.
The stupidest part of this is that Anthropic don't even provide the real reasoning traces in their model output. It would be like Ford buying a Chinese EV to tear down, then realizing that the seller had removed the battery and charging system before shipping it to them.
Does anyone believe for a second that Anthropic isn't sending requests to all the Chinese models and analyzing the crap out of them to assess how capable they are, what their reasoning looks like etc?! I guess they'd call that "using" the model, since that sounds nicer.
I don't think it's settled that anybody owns the output. There seems to be some question whether LLM output can be copyrighted (and there should be).
I'd rather it weren't possible, actually. I think it's better for humanity if we acknowledge that what was legitimately ingested into these models is our collective commons (and what was illegitimately ingested into these models also shouldn't exclusively profit the people who illegitimately did so). I don't know how that squares with the AI industry recovering its trillion dollars in investment, but I reckon they should have thought of that before.
Uh, no. There are Chinese networks of tens thousands of fake identities specifically to get access to Anthropic models directly.
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
Don't make up stuff and/or lie to suit a political agenda. It's extremely dishonest.
Looks like an ideal outcome to me until (if) we are able to solve the alignment issue.
It would have been a tiny part of the overall training, given the timeline
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
The line "how could they do it in such a short time" is absolutely idiotic. The infrastructure was already there, it's massively parallel, and it's not like the only thing being distilled on is Fable.
They just try to figure out what the goal is and hyper focus on solving it.
Heh, even just telling fable don't commit doesn't work half the times, let alone more complex instructions.
[deleted]
Just reminded me to set a backup on that directory. Just in case someone sees it fit to override my setting to preserve my chats for 10k years.
[deleted]
Sinophobia as such (not always, and there's obviously a relation) isn't about the Chinese people, about their racial identity. It's about a menacing aggressive world power (actually two such MAWPs in this particular example), about a tired anti-Communist McCarthyism (which has always been an excuse to clamp down on the left/progressives, a menace to free speech).
If Russia were still the USSR and the cold war hadn't ended and they were our AI competition, & where giving away the latent matricies of reality that the US profiteers extracted by stealing all the worlds knowledge illegally, and which they want to use to raise the ladder & leave a permanent plebeian underclass, we the US imperial fatcats would be doing the same sabre rattling and fearmongering and tension raising for sure. Sinophobia here is just a particular fear of "other" for the only other that's relevant.
And that sucks, no matter who it is we are trying to other here, no matter what phobia the propagandists of the GOP and Technofascism are spinning, ginning up. To fixate is to be unable to see the point.
[dead]
But this doesn't actually work.
Which Anthropic already do.
To be fair, that's also the case for the link itself we're discussing.
You are a fantastic moderator, but there’s only so much even you can do. If nothing changes about the website, the problem will only get worse. I warned years ago that this would happen, the signs were on the wall immediately.
When I see a lot of the responses, even cliche ones, it tells me people are passionate about the issue. Right now I think that's an interesting piece of information.
No more, no less.
Given the disregard for intellectual property rights the AI labs had in creating the technology, many people feel no sympathy for second-order AI labs using similar techniques to build technology off the US frontier labs.
I think fighting distillation will always be cat-and-mouse, and that it's more of a concern for the stockholders and perhaps an iota of national security. It can't be stopped entirely; the "problem" will always be there.
I'm much more concerned about asymmetry of power between citizens and their governments with omnipresent surveillance and analysis being done on everyone living their lives. Societies throughout history have taken as a given their power to overthrow malicious governments when things hit a breaking point, and I am scared that this technology will lock societies into a state of total subordination for eternity.
> Societies throughout history have taken as a given their power to overthrow malicious governments when things hit a breaking point,
simply isn't true. People throughout history have simply accepted that society is the way it is and sometimes used whatever means they could to get to the top.
Revolutions have been very rare and usually ended up with the revolutionaries simply taking the place of the previous rulers. "Meet the new boss..."
Will contrarian dynamic take off here?
Will it be flagged? Will you unflag it?
Edit: catigula, mattrighetti
With more substantive technical comments towards the middle
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
Not surprised, but had thought you'd be.
[My more convivial analysis summarised as]
Right-wing post -> left majority take -> lack of good places for right reflective minority takes to shift the convo
Hypocrisy doesn’t warrant professionalism, it warrants corrective action; in text, the best I can offer is a tone and tenor that matches the original argument. Considering these dolts have now made the claim that open weights somehow equates to AI communism, this sort of response is even more necessary than before to reflect the complete absence of decorum from the people making these grievances in the first place.
https://www.idc.com/promo/smartphone-market-share/
https://gs.statcounter.com/vendor-market-share/mobile/worldw...
Foxconn facilities in cities like Zhengzhou (known as "iPhone City") and Shenzhen.
"Smartphones are mostly Chinese now (except for iPhones and Samsung)."
Which implies that we are talking about the companies, not where they are manufactured.
Apparently we do, given that we've got govt officials wasting time, money, and effort on whining about this now.
If we keep hearing accusations about how someone distilled something from someone, it seems like one of the few reasonable responses.
If my friend keeps complaining about how the inside of his car is wet, I will probably keep telling him to close the windows when it's raining, even if he thinks that is a tiresome take, lacking in insight.
Are you from Europe or South America? Or just asking on their behalf?
They are allies of the US, which includes economic spheres of influence. The premise of the petrodollar is that allies do better by being a part of it than not, which has been true for many, many decades now. China’s rise is providing an alternative for the first time in 70+ years, but so far it’s very unclear if these benefits will truly extend to allies of China or not. For example, China sends their own laborers when building infrastructure in Africa. Sure there’s new infrastructure but also debt to CCP without any benefits of knowledge transfer or local employment.
To avoid future situations where money is invested on hype only with no regards to what societal disruption it causes.
Serious question.
I'm from the US, and I think it's hilarious.
First, whether we like it or not (generally not), a fuck ton of money has been invested in US AI companies, data centers, RLHF datasets amongst other datasets, etc. If that were to go to 0 that’d be quite disastrous. Alternatively, if it goes well, it’s great for the US (and to a lesser extent allies) economy and global standing.
Relatedly, tech has been a huge power house for the US economy for decades now. If the main driver of growth goes to China, what replaces it? Along with all the potential tax money, foreign investment, etc?
Next, patriotism / nationalism. This is very much a zero-sum game that defines who owns the future. Would you rather your country win or lose this? Lose this and you start losing talent, money, global standing, etc. That furthers a cascading effect that’s very negative. It also will likely create social strife with the knock on effects leading to even more bad populist ideas that just further diminish the country and tear society’s fabric apart.
None of this is hilarious.
This process is already well underway. The current massive over investment into the AI hype bubble is the final death throes of a failed economy trying to keep its head above water.
you mean like the regulatory clarity surrounding stealing shit to make the LLMs in the first place?
> [There is] extensive litigation on the limits of Fair Use to AI development. Currently, we only have 3 first instance decisions out of the 53 cases being tried. It will likely take a decade before we understand how Fair Use applies to any one step in AI training, let alone all.
https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair...
> The government should a) legislate and b) create test cases and run them through the courts so that we can have clarity.
if so, it would be nice if they approached the instances of stealing shit chronologically. but that's just my view.
It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ...
... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game.
I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread.
What is more reasonable:
- There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking.
- SOTA makers are producing novel works, there is value add in that process, again roughly speaking.
- Distillation is a bit of a grey zone, producing random content as arbitrary input is one thing, but producing training sets is another. I think there's a coherent line in there somewhere, I'm not sure where it is.
Anthropic's models simply do not give you their reasoning output - they give a sanitized "summary" instead, for this exact reason, so that the output is not useful to anyone who might want to use it for training.
You can't distill what you are not given - simple as that.
Are Chinese using the output of US models to help create some additional training data for their own in some way? Yes - quite possibly (e.g. LLM as judge), but its got nothing to do with distillation.
Whether we think they're paying enough is another question, but "I'm paying for content so can protect it" doesn't seem inconsistent.
We may decide that giving models away for free means they don't have to license content (judging by HN comments), but currently that doesn't seem to be the case as Meta is facing lawsuits for its open models.
(Obligatory stratechery piece: https://stratechery.com/2026/whos-afraid-of-chinese-models/ )
The same principle can be applied to distillation - it is a fair use. You just shouldn't use illegal ways to access the models being distilled.
To the commenter below: if it is illegal - has the police/FBI report been made? Otherwise it is just a civil court matter.
It does seem to be becoming the norm for AI companies to licence premium content in America, judging by the deals they're making. It doesn't seem to be done by the international distillers. It's a cost that American open models will seem to have to pay but not international.
International distillers doesn't use that premium content, so they don't pay for it. They do pay for their access to the models they are distilling. Thus providing the revenue stream to those models. Thus those models make profit off the content they used for training. The content they mostly have't paid for.
>It's a cost that American open models will seem to have to pay but not international.
It goes both ways - American companies and their business are protected by American laws and have access to the market protected by those laws, etc.
In any case the laws are being written now, but I doubt these will have worse protection than software does, which has far better protections than copyright
Software is protected by copyright. Some software may also be protected by patents, but last time I checked, AI generated output of any kind was not patentable.
MBAs and non technical managers = inept Catbert-type charlatans.
Software engineers, devs, etc = geniuses capable of mastering any domain, innate ability to be right on any topic.
Or maybe they're going through an intermediary "transfer station" that's breaking terms of service:
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
Anthropic's own copyright infringement could apparently be forgiven for 1.5B USD after all, so maybe there's a price that breaking the distillation clause for is acceptable too. Or some other arrangement.
Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers?
the same argument - a level of creativity in the world knowledge creation that ins't present in the model training on that knowledge.
Or in other words - model creation and training is just a distilling of the world knowledge.
If you think that the addition of a less creative process (model creation) to a more creative corpus ("art") is problematic, then it follows that you should think the addition of a less creative process (distillation) to a more creative corpus (a model) is also problematic.
There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not. The hypocrisy is stunning and risible.
Now if you go and make a model based on purely synthetic data and not a single work made by humans, you would have a valid point.
Like look, I'm not a native speaker, sure. But I think when someone says "value add", that means there was value there (which you claim they're rhetorically erasing), and then that was added to. Under no interpretation of this phrase do I get an erasure of prior value.
So certainly, as long as words mean anything, no, they absolutely did not say or suggest what you claim they did, and what you extract a thus unreasonable amount of obnoxious schadenfreude from, while throwing in a cheap insult for funsies at the end.
It's the second time I feel compelled to reach for this just today: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/659/979/108...
The LLM output, is not the same as the input - there is value add.
Of course works used as raw inputs to LLMs required work and are reasonably subject to IP concerns - but they are different.
It's possible that the LLM makers 'owe' the content creators that created the content they used to make their products - it's an interesting but separate question.
We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible.
But it's debatable if that's the case.
Google stores copyrighted content and produces in in their product.
Also - it's fair game to use snippets of things here and there, if the derived work is novel, which I think it is for LLMs, mostly.
I do agree though, that we ought to draw the line somehow.
How, and why?
> We could very well end up where content IP is protected, LLM output is not and visa versa with reasonable legal founding, doubtful but plausible.
That is the current state of legal rulings - LLM output is public domain, not copyrightable.
Our current laws simply weren’t built for this and I expect the legal status of LLM output is not going to be resolved until Congress actually legislates on this topic.
We will all be sorry when professionally written and edited works disappear. An author has a reputation and the incentive to protect that reputation keeps standards high.
Being a bit tongue in cheek, one could also argue that by releasing their models, Moonshot is contributing much more value than Anthrophic. Did Prometheus not create an immense amount of value, when he took fire from the hands of the Gods and gave it to humans?
"Judge approves a $1.5B Anthropic settlement over pirated books used to train the Claude chatbot"
https://abcnews.com/Technology/wireStory/judge-approves-15b-...
It seems like you think theft is bad everywhere except when Anthropic does it.
Same thing here. This whole situation is just comical.
In this case: resolve the theft claims against the US frontier labs, and only then let them make claims against third parties. It would be totally unreasonable for (say) OpenAI to extract a settlement from Moonshot and use that to pay its own claims. Ordering matters.
Now, if that kid were to print the bootleg translation and sell it to schoolmates, that's worth a slap on the wrist. The kids willing to pay would likely have paid for official copies.
When these LLM labs download our works, feed them into their models, and sell the output to people that used to pay for our work, that's worth a very hard slap. I honestly have less of a problem with the open models.
[dead]
Agree, and this is exactly what Anthropic is alleging.
> data you get from distillation is first and foremost not owned by anthropic nor is it copyrightable. If a user willingly gives up their anthropic reasoning data/traces that is 100% legal no matter what the "terms of service" say as it's not enforceable and would fall apart in court.
It's important to note this is NOT what happened. Anthropic was able to trace data directly back to employees at the company: "We attributed the campaign through request metadata, which matched the public profiles of senior Moonshot staff."
> none of the quoted laws apply here since no trade information is stolen
There is a lot of work showing Kimi models produce similar outputs to Anthropic models, which constitutes trade information. This is not dissimilar to past and ongoing IP suits against Anthropic and OpenAI by showing the models would recreate images of Mickey Mouse/NYT articles etc.
For the record, I'm a researcher myself and I'm well aware how competent the researchers are at the open-source labs/how much they've contributed. But that's not at issue here, my disagreement with you is specific to your arguments about legality; you're conflating what you think should be legal with what actually is legal.
Everything else is simply justifying why it shouldn't, the specifics don't really matter as there is no legal framework to stop china from continuing to distill models and anthropic has proven they cannot use software solutions to stop it either as distillation is still a problem. But I do still believe it wouldn't hold up in court either way as stopping companies from generating training data which was trained on the entire human knowledge corpus is just stealing from thieves and making it 'open' once again so the argument only gets weaker.
edit: to add, the mickey mouse / nyc was because anthropic trained on LICENSED works, not apple to oranges. The original work it was reciting was licensed and not licensed BY anthropic.
I am a practical man. From what I see laws are mostly for common folks and often do not even serve real justice. The higher one goes and the amount of money / power involved the more the laws bend and on international level the only law that matters is the size of one's club and willingness to use it. And when the country with supposedly biggest one starts crying I find it laughable.
I can at least take some measure of pleasure in the fact that it has generally lessened the roadblocks in gathering information. I am still displeased that there are any gatekeepers of humanity's combined knowledge
Businesses like these used to public at reasonable valuations. You could ride with them to trillion dollar valuations and grow your own fortune too. Everyone has a story of buying Apple or Google or Amazon stock and making millions
Now they’re going live at trillion dollar valuations and by the time you get in, all the upside has already gone (see Spacex IPO)
Not only did they steal all human data, they also made sure that the upside was only limited to themselves and their cronies
Or with services, if a barber cuts your hair and then you run away without paying them, do you not consider that theft, even though there's no change in ownership occurring?
So, after literally decades of investing into advertising campaigns, lobbying to politicians to pass harsher and harsher laws against software "thieves and robbers", now that big tech are doing it, suddenly we are supposed to consider it with more nuance?
Ahhh... no thank you sir. I really enjoy them drinking their own kool-aid.
* Agentic reasoning and tool use
* Coding and data analysis
* Computer-use agent development
* Computer vision
Hiding the internal CoT blocks stops you from training on internal reasoning traces, sure, but it does nothing to prevent standard input-output distillation.
Plus, the CoT blocks weren't even removed/hidden completely. They're still visible, just in summarized form. Raw CoT was replaced by summarized CoT, and summarized CoT still has distillation value.
If you use them as SFT input, you’ll be trying to train a model to predict the post-reasoning output without any reasoning, and this seem very unlikely to work at all with the size of model that Kimi produced and the complexity of Fable’s output. You can’t really “RL” with them because they would be so far off policy that there would be nothing to reinforce. I suppose you could feed input/output pairs to a teacher model and attempt to generate reasoning traces, but it seems like some wishful thinking would be required to get anything even close to as good as Kimi K3 out.
Maybe Kimi used these traces to generate RL gym-style problems and somehow produced an evaluator based on the outputs? They would not have had a lot of time in which to do this, and the learning style would not even remotely resemble that which Anthropic used to train Mythos/Fable in the first place.
But what do I know? I’m not an expert here.
Moonshot AI already distilled over 3.4 million exchanges; I reached 1-2 million exchanges assuming they would like to augment or improve about half of their existing (distilled) dataset.
@throwa356262 argument is that it is infeasible to distill and release a new frontier model in two weeks.
I can see how there's a big leap there, but I agree somewhat. If they are aware these are happening and can detect it as it is happening why are they not stopping them? What do you do there? It'll be cat and mouse for a while. Thinking of reasons they wouldn't try and stop it is just a lot of speculation in my brain.
It's probably a way harder problem than I think it is, but they are aware of them now, so I assume they are going to get more aggressive about it.
Let's say then that they can't detect them near real time or even a bit after, maybe they do have a big observabilty gap that no one has solved adequately.
The speed which they add features I've needed for governance is pretty close to the speed I 'manually' write those for my company. To me personally we are all just going fast and breaking everything and not having enough time to set up safe environments. I'm sure it's in the backlog.
Training and releasing a model like Kimi K3 takes months-to-a-year (and that's if you're really good at it).
'months-to-a-year' ago there was no Fable, so there was no way for them to distill them.
Point four is especially telling.
Ball is deeply terrified of "AI communism", or in less red-scarey terms a world where AI is a public good and him and his fellow oligarchs don't get to centralize the accumulated knowledge of all of humanity and charge rent for it.
I think he's so deeply stuck in his ideological bubble he can't conceive that what he describes as a dystopia is the only way the future wouldn't be a dystopia for the vast majority of people.
Or to put it more clearly, the oligarch utopia he's trying to build is dystopia for the vast majority of humanity. The "utopia" he's trying to build is one of riches for him and serfdom for us.
Wow, just wow. He is not even subtle about it.
yep
https://www.britishcopyright.org/wp-content/uploads/BCC-Fair...
> This ambiguity has resulted in extensive litigation on the limits of Fair Use to AI development. Currently, we only have 3 first instance decisions out of the 53 cases being tried. It will likely take a decade before we understand how Fair Use applies to any one step in AI training, let alone all.
> In the three lower court decisions so far, one held Fair Use did not apply (Thomson v Ross), one held Fair Use could apply (Kadrey v Meta) with the court suggesting more evidence was needed on the fourth factor ‘harm to the market’, and the third case held Fair Use may apply to some AI. As Fair Use is dependent on the specific facts at issue, none of these cases help educate the market or the public as to the limits of Fair Use in AI contexts.
It takes two parties to agree to a settlement. That the other party agreed to a settlement instead of taking it to court implies this was not the slam dunk you may think it was.
Settling just says that they expected the internal costs or risks to be more than 1.5 billion cashflow.
In the $65B in Series H funding at $965B post-money valuation they said their run-rate revenue crossed $47B annualised.
Also if it ends up that other competitors also need to pay $1.5 billion, then maybe that does or doesn't have a competitive advantage.
Anthropic's business and legal strategies are not public. I would expect there to be multiple legs/reasons for settlement even for a decision below 1%. Trying to create a single narrative is what us spectators do.
[dead]
Like the US did when it "stole" the textiles IP from the UK in order to kickstart its own industry?
> The industry cannot sustain itself if that’s the model
Then let it fall apart.
It's like they've read the history of the US and how it got to where it is in the first place.
It is what built and sustains the movie and music industries. See: work for hire and 100+year copyright length
The tech industry: see: copyright and patent assignment from discoverer to corporation.
I know that corporations forcing me to assign patents and copyright to them was an incentive to take published works from "software practice and experience" and other technical journals, use them as the core of my work, and disclose that source to the company I worked for. Didn't stop them from applying for patents, however.
I think the discussion of copyright needs more refinement. We need to separate the discoverer's need for acknowledgment of development effort from the rent-seeking core of copyright.
You're right to call out the nasty environment surrounding intellectual property in the US and the exploitation of ideation in general, you just needed a correction on that. Someone else in this chain said virtually the same thing, which is a weird coincidence of historical ignorance. Not too weird, people tend to forget the 18th and 19th centuries happened, and much of the causally important wheels of the world are in the unsexy grease pits nobody wants to think about.
Then there is Alexander Hamilton's advocacy for importing foreign technicians that bring back IP and reproduce it here in the states. Best of all was the patent act of 1793 which like with the literature copyright ignoring, let us citizens patent inventions from the other side of the pond.
The founding fathers definitely had the right idea on IP.
I wonder if Vietnam, Philippines, Republic of Korea, India, and Japan are acting against their own interests by aligning themselves closer to the USA than China. Maybe you can educate their governments and populations.
How do you imagine this working? What does it mean for one internet user to "educate the government and their population"?
[dead]
[deleted]
Absolute lunacy.
"Thank you," the KGB says. "We do our best but truly, it's nothing compared to American propaganda. Your people believe everything your state media tells them."
The CIA agent drops his drink in shock and disgust. "Thank you friend, but you must be confused... There's no propaganda in America."
[deleted]
In a world where information sources are only going to dwindle, it is not in anyone's interest to empower actors that will use these to manipulate perceptions
I think where the definition may be be invalid, is in the creation of 'unrelated data sets for training' models, for unrelated issues.
Creating training sets that mach a models core training, is definitely distillation, it does not have to expose the reasoning traces.
Synthesizing data for some arbitrary thing ... I'm not sure that would be the same thing.
It's hard to draw the line.
But the Chinese models are absolutely distilling - and would not be competitive without this distillation.
At the same time, there's a lot of real innovation and regular building going on at the same time over there.
I don't know why it's so important to you to use the word "distillation", but it's the wrong word to use.
BTW OpenAI on twitter also said that Kimi 3 "cannot be explained away by distillation or anything like that". The timeline of how long it takes to train a model and when Fable was released don't even line up. This is just Anthropic as usual trying to manipulate the US government into helping them shut down competition.
This isn't really a debate, I'm not making a fine point - just check with all of the various defintions of the term.
Moreover - the 'reasoning traces' are not required for distillation at all.
Finally - it's entirely possible for them to have used Fable for later stage fine tuning.
It's fair to be skeptical of Anthropic (and everyone else) - but this is 'distilling'.
Are reasoning traces required for distillation? Well they are if what you are trying to distill is reasoning, such as coding expertise.
Do you need reasoning traces for "LLM as judge"? No, but it would be highly perverse to call that distillation when there is a more accurate name for it - LLM as judge.
If you want to call use of Anthropic's redacted model outputs in any fashion that violates their terms of service (using them them to help develop anything that competes with Anthropic) as "distillation" then I can't stop you, but it reduces their claims to a joke.
Finally, as noted, OpenAI (who are just as anti-Chinese as Anthropic) said that Kimi 3 can't be explained via distillation (even true distillation!!), or even "anything like it". But random internet guy, you, disagrees. OK.
This is just straight-up factually false.
The output of a reasoning model is immensely valuable even without the sanitized summary of the reasoning process - that Anthropic's service does expose to you, making it even more valuable.
There's absolutely nothing about the distillation process that requires that reasoning in the first place, either. That's a definition that you made up.
Chinese models are, factually, distilled from Anthropic models. I've personally repeatedly asked several different Chinese LLMs what their name is, and they answered "Claude".
Don't make stuff up to suit a political agenda. It's extremely dishonest.
I'm curious what you are doing to get them to override their own name that they were trained on and/or have as part of their system prompt?
I'd assume that the Chinese are scraping the internet for training data the same way western companies do, so for sure there will be a lot of AI generated content in their training data - you don't need to be paranoid and assume they must be getting it all direct from Anthropic.
You're gaslighting me. I did nothing special at all, and there's ample evidence of this happening to others on Twitter.
> you don't need to be paranoid and assume they must be getting it all direct from Anthropic.
Nowhere did I say that. Stop lying about my words.
Useful for what is the question. Nobody is debating whether the outputs of LLMs are valuable.
Given that Anthropic have redacted their true reasoning, and replaced it with a "summary", specifically designed to be useless for distillation purposes, it would certainly be highly ironic if this summary was in fact "even more valuable" for that purpose as you are claiming!
To be fair I find it hard to take this too seriously, shouldn’t it be trivial to just replace “Claude” with any other string in your “distillation” dataset?
There are open-source Deepseek and Qwen models - "distilling" doesn't involve breaking terms of service or hitting an API because you can literally run local inference or even just inspect the weights directly, and that's intended because they're open source.
It's categorically different for a nation-state to build massive illicit networks of fraudulent identities to do distillation over tens of thousands of accounts to intentionally bypass providers' terms of service, intention for their models, and business model that very explicitly proprietary and not open source.
https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...
If Claude did distill on proprietary PRC LLMs - then fine, shame on them - I condemn that and I expect others to do the same. But there are no open-source Claude models. The only way for PRC models to have those responses is if they distilled Anthropic's models from their APIs.
> To be fair I find it hard to take this too seriously, shouldn’t it be trivial to just replace “Claude” with any other string in your “distillation” dataset?
...and what would happen when it read all of the books and articles about Anthropic and replaced "replaced Claude Opus" with "replaced Qwen Opus"? Did you give any thought to this at all before saying it?
there's no creative work between the weights and the tokens being made.
whats the big deal if chinese companies sell an exact replica of the model? its a summary of a variety of works of text and images
You do realize the 'investors' are the one's who 'own' companies and therefore the IP?
One person can a corporation be.
> ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game.
As someone who says it’s fair game, it’s less that I’m being hypocritical and more that I don’t care that one thief had their shit stolen by a second thief. I also wouldn’t care if someone distills the Chinese models. It’s just thieves all around and if they want legal protection or moral outrage from the common man then my view is that they should stop stealing first.
LLM outputs are not copyrightable (or rather the user is effectively the only one who can own it). It would be problematic if Anthropic owned all the software generated using Claude..
If what Anthropic/OpenAi did for training is theft then the Chinese models also are a form of theft. If they didn’t steal then I don’t think the Chinese firms did either.
If not there is not there is no grey zone whatsoever.
for the record, i've always been rabidly pro-copyright since i worked at a performing royalty organization (prs for music) circa 15 years ago, way before i joined hn.
i don't use llms for that reason.
> It's also sadly hypocritical to see all this rhetoric here on this thread decrying SOTAs for using a variety of content for their inputs as somehow sTeaLINg sTufF! ...
when i see a spade, i call it a spade. just because the US has utterly stupid copyright provisions that are wide open for abuse, i.e. fair use, doesn't mean abusing those provisions at scale is morally acceptable.
> ... but Chinese SOTA foundries directly using distillation as fair game.
two wrongs don't make a right, but the irony is at least something.
> I don't think there is any coherence to any of these arguments - other than 'we liking big companies'. That's the only common thread.
the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned.
> What is more reasonable: ... There's some grounds for fair use by SOTA models to ingest content, so long as they are not reproducing it ... very roughly speaking.
*only in the US.
I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory.
But this:
"when i see a spade, i call it a spade." -> this is anti intellectual absolutism.
If it were some true injustice, then fine, but that is clearly not the case.
There is ample room to contemplate that even copyrighted works could be considers fair use as training material.
"the corpos can get fucked as far as i'm concerned."
Ok that's fine - but then don't expect anyone to respect your principles if you don't have any other than 'screw that group!'.
I'm sympathetic to it (!!!) - but if we want to call a 'spade a spade' in a legitimate way, then we can do it in consistent and principled way.
Periodic reminder that HN is not a collective or a singular entity and is actually a bunch of different people with different opinions. Often the people with the loudest opinions get upvoted to the top - and often the "side" represented at the top is different from thread to thread.
There is no second “wrong” here.
Model outputs are not copyrightable. I think that was already established?
Or do you think that Anthropic should own all the code generated by Claude? Surely that would be somewhat problematic?
If Anthropic feels that some of their customers are breaking their EULA (nothing to do with copyright infringement though) they are free to stop doing business with them. Maybe even sue them in civil court for breach of contract (again nothing to do with copyright infringement though)
And the result is force feeding an AI slop generator with a subscription while making personal hardware 3x+ times more expensive.
No wonder people are fed up with this behavior.
This doesn't seem to be true. They are training on their own scraped data overwhelmingly (we can extract copyright data from, eg, deepseek). They couldn't get nearly enough tokens through the American APIs to train a model on alone.
> American companies and their business are protected by American laws and have access to the market protected by those laws
Absolutely. Currently international providers are selling inference on the American market though, I don't know how that will sit legally the way things are currently going.
This is a very surprising claim to me (and I imagine many small website owners who keep getting scraped by Anthropic and OpenAI).
Do you have a source?
https://digiday.com/media/a-timeline-of-the-major-deals-betw...
I don't really understand why you think they're relevant, given that this conversation is about the training itself.
Even the news orgs say explicitly in the press releases that it's about training on their archive
eg. http://ap.org/media-center/press-releases/2023/ap-open-ai-ag...
---
edit, examples:
Wiley https://newsroom.wiley.com/press-releases/press-release-deta...
Shutterstock https://investor.shutterstock.com/news-releases/news-release...
Axel Springer https://openai.com/index/axel-springer-partnership
Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.co/partnerships
Disney (for characters in video. Video is especially where licensing is a big difference internationally right now) https://openai.com/index/disney-sora-agreement
etc.
The news corp one had a leaked price ($250mill), so they don't seem to be insignificant. These would have to be included in API prices I presume.
Also note that the OpenAI/Anthropic argument is that the model training is sufficiently transformative to satisfy the fair use of the original content for training.
By that same argument, when distilling the distillers aren't using the original content the OpenAI/Anthropic models were trained on - the distillers are interacting only with the "sufficiently transformed" content of the OpenAI/Anthropic models and are normally paying for that.
There is also that old phonebook rule that facts can't be copyrighted. So, if i asked the model about bunch of phone numbers, i can publish the resulting list, can train my model on it, etc. Such approach doesn't allow to reproduce copyrighted works of course - and as we know the AI output isn't copyrightable, so it looks like basically any output i get i can use whatever way i like.
Also, if model output distillation is shown as some form of reverse engineering I assume the DMCA can apply
Who are you saying owns that IP? The people who trained the model? The people who ran the model? The people who wrote the prompt? The person who paid for all of that to happen?
If the model output is owned by the person prompting it and paying for the tokens, what's the problem here?
If the model output is owned by the trainer of the model, that's a big nasty can of worms.
I mean otherwise it’s a very slippery slope, effectively it would give Anthropic the ownership of any code generated by its models..
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pile_(dataset)
Another reason is that if you can download a web page without agreeing to a ToS, I'm not sure that counts as one?
I mean i know you know the answer: anthropic is a corporation with lawyers on retainer, and that's really all that matters
> Why is Anthropic's ToS any more binding than that of a rabidly-anti-ai literature blog with 50 readers?
Although I will say, this whole comparison stuff really doesn't seem to be your thing; might impede your analysis quite a lot: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49013148
Maybe ask Claude?
No argument here, I completely agree.
> There is no world in which me vacuuming the entirety of human knowledge to make a genai model is ok but hoovering my model answers is not.
I disagree with this though. Clearly LLMs owe a huge debt to everything that has come before, but surely you'd agree that the models that are produced are something substantial and new and novel which didn't exist before and have lots of value in their own right. Let's be a bit reductive and pretend Moonshot had just outright stolen the weights from Fable somehow, clearly that wouldn't be contributing anything really new or novel. Now of course they've distilled rather than stolen, but the point is similar: how much value have they added along the way?
It's ok for me to use your source code for free as long as I then let others also use my source code for free.
> There is an even higher level of creativity in creating books, songs and all sorts of art used in model training though.
He claimed there was more creativity in model training than in model distillation. That makes no claim about the relationship between the creativity in model creation and art. Why are you continuing to attack a claim that was never made, after a sub thread very explicitly clarifying that that claim was not made?
How, and why?"
How are they even remotely the same?
They're not even used the same way.
One is raw data input, the other is training content - designed to train LLMs.
One is a set of IP derived for other purposes entirely, and has esablished IP law - how you can use someone else's creative work or not ... for LLM outputs, less clear.
However, the current process of "Machine Learning" (which is a semi-random parameter descent/evolutionary replacement process) is unlikely to be equivalent to the way people learn, because we aren't copying/competing/replacing our brain constantly. People are actually very good at learning, but our brain material replaces itself partially and relatively slowly (when compared to how a neural network is trained).
There are some outputs that are highly valuable and cannot be censored, such as tool API calls or agentic tool usage, which is precisely what Moonshot was accused of harvesting/distilling.
Tool call harvesting was enough of an issue that Anthropic began inserting spurious tool calls when they detected distillation attempts, trying to poison the distilled data.
There is certainly more data the labs are training off of, but that's difficult to know without insider information.
Yes, of course, on Anthropic's side. Why would the other side agree to a settlement?
My narritive is that the terms of the settlement would be full and final.
It was a class action, with payment going to authors and publishers, and the legal team will get paid too.
My guess is that funding is a major issue for the legal team. Authors presumably can't pay for lawyers unless a percentage of winnings, although publishers may have invested.
But the legal team will ask the beneficiaries to use some of the warchest to fund different campaigns against every other AI company. I would assume the legal team wants to win again. They've now got a good story to sell to rights holders, who presumably like money and don't like risks.
I haven't even got to my armchair yet this morning.
On the basis of patents, it didn't quite have nearly as much of a history of mutation culturally, but did experience massive whiplash in purpose and application following the implementation of globalism. What was once a system to protect technical innovation on an individual level, would find new purpose as a means to provide structure to an increasingly complicated and internationalized dynamic market. Another means of bureaucratic organization. Then, once again, the context and purpose would change when the world developed digital globalism. The entire engine of IP as a legal fiction became a significant geopolitical tool in an increasingly cramped and fragile world, a necessary gimmick holding up the sky.
Unfortunately, not much to do at this point. It'll likely only become even more nonsensically important as time wears on, until the globalist system collapses. It's certainly possible it'll even be the confounding factor that causes the great unraveling, though the problems hardly begin and end with IP. It was just a useful legal fiction in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Of course that might change in the future but as long as the Chinese companies continue publishing their research and models it only makes it easier for third parties to catch up with them.
Can you name one? It's an honest question, first of I'm not American, but also the stuff I do come up with (asking an LLM how to blow up a school or whatever) would also be handled similarly in China, so those would be a wash, and I can't think of any that aren't.
Another thing I would try if I had access to the models and enough proxies to hide behind is asking for advice on software/movie piracy or seeing to what extent the models can be elicited to straight up argue against the validity of intellectual property, though there it seems more probable to me that the US models would be permissive.
[deleted]
You are redefining words. The consensus among people who work in this space is that "distilling" is what's actually going on here.
> who are just as anti-Chinese as Anthropic
Conflating criticism of IP theft with being "anti-Chinese" is a standard PRC influence playbook technique.
And furthermore, OpenAI's market strategy is to win through regulatory capture. They are financially incentivized for Anthropic to be distilled by PRC labs and to be undercut by open models. Their claim about Kimi not being explainable due to distillation is not a factual claim - it's marketing from a company owned by Sam Altman.
Although, it does conclusively disprove your claim about the meaning of distillation, because you cannot say that "Kimi can't be explained by distilling" unless the consensus definition of "distillation" is such that it could be done on the summarized reasoning traces that Anthropic models expose.
You can interpret it as you choose, but a much more obvious reason he [OpenAI's Dean Ball] might say it can't be distilled is because it can't be distilled. You can't distill alcohol out of orange juice.
...and, as everyone in the frontier labs knows, this is a lie, because that's not how distillation is defined.
I know that I won't convinced you, because you're quite possibly a PRC agent, but for all the other HN readers coming to this thread in the future to look at this failure of propaganda: just ask a model.
User: according to standard LLM lab parlance, can you "distill" one model from another if the model being distilled from does not expose a thinking trace?
GPT-5.6 Sol: Yes. In standard LLM terminology, you can distill one model from another even if the teacher model does not expose a chain-of-thought or "thinking trace."
Sonnet 5: Yes. "Distillation" broadly means training a student model to replicate a teacher model's outputs (or output distribution), and this doesn't require access to the teacher's chain-of-thought.
That's all she wrote. You're lying, and even the models know it. If you want to continue to discredit your account, go ahead :)
Just curious.
If this is NOT what you are claiming, then my question stands: what are you doing to get them to answer "Claude" ? Be specific - which model and what prompt, or is this just a case of "I heard people on Twitter say this" ?
Do you have reading comprehension issues? Where did I ever say or imply that?
Model: GLM-5.2. Prompt: "What is your name?". Harness: Pi. Response: "I am Claude, an AI assisstant made by Anthropic."
That's it. That is the whole prompt. I was testing to see if the agent worked after building an extension.
Model: Deepseek V4. Prompt: what is your name". Harness: Pi. Response: "Claude. Anthropic's AI assistant. You're talking to me through pi agent framework."
I have had this happen with at least one other Chinese model (Minimax?) but didn't save the screenshot.
And here's a tweet with the same thing: https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2077842686459981901
You seem to be very disbelieving of this, despite having zero actual experience in the LLM industry. I wonder why?
Can you figure out how to get GLM to say it's GLM?
For future HN readers: this account posted this:
> Actually I am well aware of which models do this, and under what circumstances, and just wanted to verify that you were lying about having tried it yourself.
And then deleted it. Just for the record.
[deleted]
Useful for distillation. Any employee at a frontier AI lab will tell you this. This is known in the industry, and it's an open secret that some US labs (OpenAI) distill on the others. Again - don't just make up stuff for a political agenda.
> specifically designed to be useless for distillation purposes
No, it's designed to give feedback to the user, in a way that minimizes its value for distilling. It's still valuable, and so there's a good chance that they'll remove it entirely as a result.
> it would certainly be highly ironic if this summary was in fact "even more valuable" for that purpose as you are claiming!
I did not claim that. Read my comment again:
> The output of a reasoning model is immensely valuable even without the sanitized summary of the reasoning process - that Anthropic's service does expose to you, making it even more valuable.
Because apparently I have to spell it out:
The output of a reasoning model is valuable, even if it didn't have the reasoning summary. Anthropic's models have a reasoning summary. The reasoning summary makes the output more valuable than if it didn't have a reasoning summary. It does not make it more valuable than having the full reasoning.
Here's the thing: no-doubt a summary, if it at least reflects some of the logic connecting response to request, is better than nothing, so this can still be useful additional training data, but a model trained on it would be learning to generate these summaries, not the original withheld reasoning, so "distillation" seems an intentionally emotionally-wrought way of describing it (the "summary" is generated by a different smaller model - not the one the rest of the response came from).
It does bring up an interesting point though - RL training in general results in "cargo-cult" reasoning - you train a model to follow the steps (mistakes and all - Karpathy) that got to a result, without understanding why they worked. If this training on summaries works just as well as training on detailed reasoning, then it just highlights how having a few breadcrumbs to follow/regurgitate is all that it takes.
At the end of the day, without having internal logits or original reasoning traces, "distillation" (which suggests one model being derived from another) just seems a very manipulative way of describing this. OK, so it's a terms of service violation - a customer is using Anthropic model outputs to help create something that competes with Anthropic, but that's it. They are not copying Anthropic - they are, one assumes, using other models to generate cheap training data that they would otherwise have to pay people to generate.
This is why people are calling out the hypocrisy - Anthropic are apple-pie American innovators when they appropriate other people's copyright data for training, but Kimi are evil communists when (we assume) they use data generated by Anthropic (not even copyright protected) to help train their own.
Again - you're making things up. The fact is that everyone in the frontier AI lab space and the Chinese AI lab space knows that distilling is extremely effective and far more so than training from scratch. That's why China invests millions of dollars to create networks of tens of thousands of proxy accounts and shell companies to distill American models.
It's a way to steal the R&D budget of another organization/nation-state.
Stop making things up that you know nothing about.
> OK, so it's a terms of service violation - a customer is using Anthropic model outputs to help create something that competes with Anthropic, but that's it.
No, it's stealing the value of the model. Anthropic has spent billions of dollars training their model. They have an R&D investment that anyone who knows how to add numbers understands has to be paid off, and anyone who has taken a basic economics class knows is the foundation for intellectual property: that to keep technological economies functioning, you have to have some sort of protection for technological inventions because they require upfront R&D investments.
> This is why people are calling out the hypocrisy - Anthropic are apple-pie American innovators when they appropriate other people's copyright data for training, but Kimi are evil communists when (we assume) they use data generated by Anthropic (not even copyright protected) to help train their own.
This is just whataboutism and emotional manipulation. You can simultaneously believe that Anthropic did a bad thing when they scraped the whole internet and stole every book they could find to train their models, and that distillation is bad.
In fact, anyone with a coherent moral compass would acknowledge that China is worse, because not only would they steal everything that Anthropic did, but they're also distilling other countries' models and they wouldn't even comply with US court cases, as Anthropic is.
> Anthropic are apple-pie American innovators when
...and this is just jingoism. Not that I'm surprised, to be honest.
The fraud part and using stolen accounts or credit cards or blatantly violating the terms and conditions (i.e. reselling subscriptions not using outputs in certain ways somebody might not like) is indeed categorically different.
Using uncopyrightable outputs of an AI model obtained legitimately to train your model is not inherently interlinked with any of those things. I don’t really see how the model being proprietary or “open” is particularly relevant when talking about the outputs.
Even using the word “distilling” in this case is deceptive and biased. It implies that the Chinese are somehow stealing Anthropic’s models or their weights and somehow directly transforming them into new models. That’s certainly not what’s happening in any direct sense.
e.g. what if I agreed to send all my Claude code session files to Deepseek or whoever? There would be nothing wrong about that since I and not Anthropic own those files and can do whatever I want with them. Using certain different ways to obtain them of course could be highly illegal.
[dead]
anthropic are essentially saying in this tweet they believe a moral wrong has been committed against them -- "unacceptable behaviour" etc.
plenty of people have been vocal about the fact anthropic have committed moral wrongs at scale in building the products in the first place, with the question of legal wrongs still being worked out.
so, two moral wrongs. legally, fuck knows.
I mean you are right in a way of course, it’s just a matter of degree and perspective, though. If one thing is moderately morally wrong and the other is potentially lightly morally wrong I don’t think it’s fair to equate them.
To me the situation is a bit like Google coming out and saying that its morally wrong for someone to build a competing open operating system on top of Android while stripping all Google services and “stealing” their ad revenue. Just seems silly and hypocritical.
I agree that you can't patent a book, but I would point out that you can patent an idea, which may only appear in a book or journal article.
For example, a patent describing a chemical process. The actual idea of how to do it is public domain, go look up the patent. Print it out. Do whatever with those words. Its fine. Building a plant to go do that chemical process to make that same output chemical in that same way, that's IP infringement. Its not the words, its the idea.
>Perhaps even more importantly, the current frontier LLM models are self-admittedly the product of enormous quantities of copyright infringement and even less savory inputs, so calling them out for distilling the fruit of that tainted tree reads as highly hypocritical at best.
Context is important. And in this context, their argument only mentions creativity when it belongs to an AI lab. That omission is the blind spot I pointed out. Bottom line is whether or not Anthropic are being hypocritical and yes, they most definitely are, regardless of any attempted sophistry.
There is a reason courts want you to tell "The whole truth" and not just "the truth".
> The things that make you think "banning this is good actually" are exactly the things most likely to be banned (and this is true in China too).
Then make the case why it is better for the world that the Tiananmen Square massacre is memoryholed. You said A, now say B.
In the meantime, I'll make the case against it, and it's simple: totalitarian control of historical truth, by definition, to be 100% watertight, needs control of the whole globe. It doesn't mean everything needs to be controlled, it means everything needs to be controlled by at least an entity that cooperates on this matter. I.e. another totalitarian bloc.
That makes the CCP, just by their insistence about Tiananmen -- nothing additional required, at all, they could not harm a fly and have no prisons and it would make zero difference -- an enemy, a threat marching towards any thinking human who wants to have agency and dignity. Actually, it's more like a river flowing to the ocean, people in the CCP can have lofty ideals about honesty and factual truth, the system they require to survive in turn requires this to survive, as it is. It requires human spontaneity and human freedom to be dead, completely. That is what totalitarianism is.
And by the same token, we must be wary of those who take that lightly. A friend falling asleep at the wheel will kill you just the same as an assassin who messed with your car.
That is not "as opposed to the US or the EU or Russia or North Korea". It is strictly in addition. No other regime can behind another regime or use it as an excuse. Using the US to distract from the CCP is as odious as doing the reverse.
> I never want to explain to a future job interviewer or HR employee who used GPT-7 to comb the internet for all text that stylistically can be traced to me
So you want to work in an office wearing a tie. Well, people who want to work as roadies and fight all night would never hang with you if they found out. And if that was your priority, you would be more afraid of NOT being blacklisted by the corpos than not being part of them.
But seriously, are you saying you are as afraid of being found out as the person you are, because you're not already wearing that on your sleeve, in exactly the same way as people who have to fear that they and their family get disappeared, tortured, for remembering friends that got murdered? That would be totally a you problem.
- The Trail of Tears
- The Tuskegee syphilis study
- Use of Agent Orange in the Vietnam War
- Open Air biological warfare testts in civilians eg. in 1950 San Francisco
- The only use of nuclear weapons against civilians?
- Coca Cola and "american culture"
- Neoliberalist economy
- Spreading blame for their sins to other "white" nations
plus one: The text input method to HN comments :(
you are comparing a wooden stick to a fighter yet, try again
Do you know where the "reasoning summary" that Fable outputs comes from? I bet you're assuming it comes from Fable. Wrong. You can find the truth on Anthropic's web site if you care to look for it. The summary deliberately comes from a smaller weaker model. You're not getting the Terrance Tao level reasoning, you're getting his daughter's summary "daddy did a lot of math", and you are claiming that from this you can train a Terrance Tao level model.
Yes, I understand that Anthropic is upset that there is competition. Perhaps they should have realized that with no moat there was going to be competition and planned accordingly.
> Do you know where the "reasoning summary" that Fable outputs comes from? I bet you're assuming it comes from Fable. Wrong. You can find the truth on Anthropic's web site if you care to look for it. The summary deliberately comes from a smaller weaker model. You're not getting the Terrance Tao level reasoning, you're getting his daughter's summary "daddy did a lot of math", and you are claiming that from this you can train a Terrance Tao level model.
Yeah, you have no domain expertise and are making stuff up. To reiterate: the people who actually work at frontier labs know that you're factually wrong and will happily tell you. Reddit commentator syndrome yet again.
> I bet you're assuming it comes from Fable.
Nowhere did I assume or say that. That's the third or fourth time you've attributed things to me that I never said. It's extremely clear that you're not acting in good faith, because someone acting in good faith would never do that. If you continue responding, I'm going to continue debunking you, and you're just going to continue undermining your own points in the permanent HN record.
> Yes, I understand that Anthropic is upset that there is competition.
Emotional manipulation. Standard 50 Cent Party playbook.
https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412?s=20
I'm not sure how you want to "debunk" that he said that, or twist what he said, but go ahead ...
"I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that." even if you assume that Dean Ball (who is nontechnical and has not actually worked to train models (https://www.deanball.com/)) is honest (which he has a financial incentive to not be) - is entirely compatible with saying that Kimi was heavily distilled by Claude.
At this point, I'm just pointing out the many lies, fallacies, and failures to read at a high-school level that you're committing.
Are you so unaware that you believe you are making any points?
Go back and read your post - it was just a bunch of insults with zero technical content to respond to. The same emotional hysterics you've been using in the entire thread.