American companies are spending enormous sums to develop high-performing AI models. Distillation attacks are attempting to maliciously extract them — and nobody is doing much to stop it.

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[–] The_Walkening@hexbear.net 3 points 15 hours ago (1 children)

lol. love when people are panicking about this when it means that these things are basically interchangeable anyways. Didn't someone at Google write a memo that was like "we're kinda fucked b/c you can re-create this stuff with enough resources" like 2 years ago?

[–] p03locke@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 13 hours ago

Didn’t someone at Google write a memo that was like “we’re kinda fucked b/c you can re-create this stuff with enough resources” like 2 years ago?

Basically, yes. They were specifically decrying the amount of open-sourcing they and their American competitors were doing, because capitalism, of course. Around this time, we had examples like StabilityAI's StableDiffusion and Meta's LLaMA as open-source models. And around this time, everybody else started closing their models, despite the fact that the research kept on going out in the open. StabilityAI kept their models open, mostly because they had no choice, but the attitude shifted towards profitability.

So, China took the open-source mantle, and these open/closed lines are being drawn strictly around national divisions as this American vs. China slant. Which is mostly a diversion of the real battle.