[resfirestar]

Whatever you think of the ethics of doing this, it does hurt the reputation of the follower labs in my mind. If their capabilities can't exist without the work of the frontier labs, they're less equal competitors and more the guys trying to sell you a shoddy knockoff. Not that there's no use case for shoddy knockoffs.

[janalsncm]

It’s not that capabilities could not exist without the original work. It’s more that the shortest path between A and B isn’t repeating all of the same work.

Further, although media likes to depict Chinese labs as “just copying” I think there’s a ton of hubris involved. First of all, American labs are filled with Chinese who are trained at the very same schools as Chinese labs. Second, if you look at the contributions from Chinese labs many have pushed the state of the art.

Zooming out, data is kind of an arbitrary line to draw. Anthropic didn’t invent the neural network, back propagation, or the transformer. They didn’t invent all of the post training techniques they are using. They might even be using some pretrained open models during pre training and data prep. They got all of those for free because those things are shared openly.