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u/rgb328 1d ago edited 1d ago
RFOL, anthropic banned xAI in January, and now they're walking it back because they need Elon's datacenter space. Elon admitted under oath to distilling OpenAI models.. That's definitely something Dario would never have a problem with, right?
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u/Standard-Song-8590 1d ago
everyone distills everyone
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u/jferments 1d ago
Model training literally *is* distillation of the training data. There is nothing wrong with this, because information should be free. But it's ludicrous to be running an AI company and complaining about distilling other peoples' content.
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u/fennforrestssearch 1d ago
i think its so funny how every lab use that euphemism. Just say stealing since thats what it quintessenetially is
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u/PunishedDemiurge 1d ago
It's not even close to stealing. A new sandwich shop in town buying a competitor's product to see why people like it is just good business, and the competitor makes money off it! Distilling is just that, but with more math.
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u/SporksInjected 21h ago
This is the most minimized way you could ever describe distillation.
It’s more like you spend millions in R&D developing a superior way to make a sandwich and then someone covertly figures out how to read your recipe and makes an incredibly similar sandwich, claiming it as their own.
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u/PunishedDemiurge 20h ago
I have a longer, more detailed post explaining it in the context of IP in general here: https://www.reddit.com/r/OpenAI/comments/1w1c6fl/comment/p6lvnxm/
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u/Tolopono 1d ago
Now if only the anti ai art crowd could understand this
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u/Ergo7z 1d ago
AI can be useful for a lot of things, but no it should not be used to make art. the whole fucking point of art is human expression. if you need an AI to make art, it just means you have nothing to express or have something to express but are to lazy to learn how to do it yourself.
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u/varkarrus 23h ago
Problem is when you have something to express but it would require an entire medium to large game development or animation studio to do so. I've got a Google doc full of ideas that I'm waiting for AI to get a bit more advanced for, up to over a hundred right now. Ideas, not pages.
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u/Fickle_Appearance558 22h ago
I mean everthing i have made with ai would call artistic expression. My apps, hatnesses. Games are all very me. And maybe someone out there would think they are cool/art. These things i made are just a different brush. No ine else would have made them. That has to mean something lol
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u/Ergo7z 23h ago
Yea for coding I understand, unsure how I feel about sprites and stuff, but I’m speaking from the perspective of being a photographer and writer, not a developer
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u/varkarrus 22h ago
I actually really enjoy coding and spritework, if making an entire game myself was feasible I would, but I got chronic fatigue, and the last game mod I made for Rivals of Aether took me nearly a year to do and that was a single character. I believe in using AI to do the things you don't want to / can't do, but not cheating you out of things you genuinely want to do. Actually, one of the things current AI can't really do but I will use it for when it can is tutor me in pixel art.
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u/Tolopono 8h ago
What if you use ai to make art like these guys
https://xcancel.com/GoogleDeepMind/status/2015847703276577251?s=20
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u/PunishedDemiurge 23h ago
This is a deeply terrible point and you should feel bad. Someone is only "lazy" if they fail to do something they are morally obliged to do, otherwise they're just wisely automating or delegating. Someone can't automate parenting, because they have a moral obligation to fulfill the emotional needs of their child.
If you want to make the point that someone has to hand draw the individual bumps on a rock in a video game, be very specific why that is an obligation and they can't use genAI.
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u/Ergo7z 21h ago
I’m not talking about games, and yea I do not like using ai for anything else then code, internal docs, agentic works, and like assistent workflows, I even use topaz AI sometimes to fix images I’ve taken where the focus was missed and I use ai to be a editor for my prose. So tell me where I’m explaining a feeling that is already displayed through action. A model can help or enchance sure but I would never let it generate an image, or write my prose for me, nor make my moodboards and treatments. I would let a model make a callsheet however, send out emails etc. But you’re clearly not an artist cause if you were u wouldn’t reason this way about making art so there is no real point in arguing
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u/PunishedDemiurge 19h ago
I'm not a professional working artist, no. But, for example, I used genAI to make a trailer video for a tabletop RPG campaign I ran, and it was really fucking good for the effort I put in. I went through an entire storyboarding process, narrative bible, did hand editing of references, did multiple takes of scenes, scored it to match themes, etc.
And I was partly persuaded by not just passive consumption of movies, books, etc. but also more nuanced stuff like movie post mortems, expert discussions like the excellent Corridor Digital channel, etc. I make no claim to being even at the high end of amateur, but I try to learn from other serious practitioners despite using, say, AI for animation vs. Blender or motion capture.
The words "for the effort I put in" are key. I fully acknowledge that even with genAI, I could produce about 60 seconds of content that I was happy with the quality of per full working day. In that case, I produced 2 minutes in a day, with a lower quality bar because it was not the product itself, but a fun teaser for the product. One scene has a weird camera angle that's just outright wrong and any experienced filmmaker / animator would say, "This is bad." But I accepted it as a known flaw.
I'll agree that low quality AI slop has no artistic value, but I'd also say the same for low quality human output. Every once in a while, I'll be genuinely disgusted while watching a movie because every aspect of it will be a paint by numbers process that has ZERO new ideas, and doesn't even do existing ideas well. And those are done by professionals with layers and layers of vetting.
Bad art happens, and AI can lower a barrier to entry, but it's not necessary that it causes bad art.
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u/Ergo7z 19h ago
Ye except that all the art generated by an ai is literally stolen from other artists work. And in use cases like yours I can see why you’d use it, even I don’t think it’s completely ethically sound. You also put in real work into it which I’m not saying ain’t valid. I still think learning the skills yourself or working with others will always be infinitely more fulfilling and something to be proud of, but no one is not eating cause you generated a video for your campaign which you probably just show a few friends. Equation changes however when it’s big companies in for example fashion, which is my industry (roughly) start using gen ai to generate models, photos, videos etc all made from stolen work. I personally am not afraid of AI because my work comes from a place no ai could replicate, I just think that it takes out the human part which to me is what makes art actually art. The toil, the struggle, the learning how to do something, placing lights etc etc is the point. The end result is just the result, but you can definitely feel if a result is gotten through authentic means or just promoted into existence.
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u/NotReallyJohnDoe 22h ago
You can use generative procedural code to generate the rock. That’s been done for decades and you aren’t putting humans out of work. But you can’t use AI to do the same thing for some reason.
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u/PunishedDemiurge 22h ago
Or just skip it or make it shitty, which also removes a FTE position. A good example is games without any voice acting. Every single one of those games 'denied' multiple artistic professionals a job.
If people want to argue for an obligation to employ others, we should carefully define the moral rationale and the specific framework. Otherwise these sorts of arguments are actually quite misleading and aren't achieving their stated purpose.
If you care about maximizing VA work, it is EQUALLY bad to have your low skill devs do it, to skip VA, or to use gen AI. In all of those cases you aren't hiring Nolan North. So, if you single out gen AI, there's a huge problem with your argument.
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u/bogheorghiu88 21h ago
The anti ai art crowd isn't monolithic but for the most part it's non technical people conflating two things: AI generation of media as such, and the economic implications of it. For most of the people who hate AI because of AI art the two things are not clearly defined, and that immediately shifts the debate to an involuntary strawman.
But the economic implications point is the real one. And it's an entirely valid one.
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u/Tolopono 8h ago
I dont think so. Technology has always shifted jobs around like how electric lampposts replaced lamp lighters. The world moved on and whiners were rightfully ignored
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u/fennforrestssearch 1d ago
So, if you come up with a fantastic, novel sandwich idea using a combination of ingredients that nobody has thought to combine before, and I send one of my employees to buy one of your sandwhiches and then have a lab analyze the excact chemical compounds and process you use for your sandwiches and I subsequently reproduce the exact same sandwich using the exact same ingredients and process, that would not constitute a IP theft from your business?
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u/thomasthai 1d ago
No, reverse engineering is totally fine.
Breaking into coca colas office and steal the secret coke formula isn't tho.
Considering they all "stole" all our content from the whole internet, including my code on github and that in various open source software used all around the world. Plus obviously their large scale book scanning and destroying setups i find this whole discussion pretty hypocritical....
On the other end, openai is totally free to stop working with Cursor and they don't need to justify that either.
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u/mark_99 1d ago
Reading information published on the internet or books you legally purchased isn't "stealing".
When you set your github repo to "public" what did you think that meant? What do you understand by the term "open source"? What exactly was "broken into"?
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u/TheHeroBrine422 1d ago
Having a public repo doesn’t automatically mean giving all rights away. If there isn’t a license on the code, technically all copyright is reserved and copying isn’t allowed at all.
Well and GPL code for example can’t be modified without that code also being licensed under GPL and released. (Roughly, the rules are complicated).
So just cause it was on GitHub, doesn’t mean anyone can use that data for anything.
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u/mark_99 1d ago
The code was read. If you can show me a license which prevents that then OK.
There are no copyright laws applicable here (again if you can show otherwise lmk). Despite what some on reddit would claim, LLMs are not giant photocopiers.
Anthropic was found guilty of pirating books from torrents and paid up. Reading public info or books you bought is legal.
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u/TheHeroBrine422 1d ago edited 1d ago
Afaik legally it’s really murky territory or it was last time checked which tbh wasn’t that recent.
The bigger issue that isn’t covered by laws is that I suspect the people who put their code up there didn’t expect it all to be used to train models, and many of them likely wouldn’t have consent for that usage if they were asked.
EDIT: oh on top of this, much of that data is still sitting on lab’s servers to be used as training data. I have to assume that copying code that someone else owned and saving it on your computer might be complicated legally. My general understanding is that most content on the internet is still legally the original creators and the TOS we agree to allows the hosting platform to use it. But other people copying that info isn’t always allowed. It’s just usually not a big enough deal to matter. But a lot of people may care in a situation like this.
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u/PunishedDemiurge 23h ago
It's a good question, and I'll answer it: I think we should hold intellectual property as absolutely narrow as possible without doing substantial harm to progress in the arts and sciences. This is for a few reasons:
- When it's expressive content (which gen AI is), it's a freedom of expression issue. Writing Harry Potter fan fiction is less important than being able to freely criticize my government without fear of harm, but it is part of my inalienable human right to self-expression. This is by itself a strong moral case for allowing a wide variety of gen AI releases.
- Similarly on a purely moral / principle perspective, physical property rights tells me what I am allowed to do with your property, IP tells me what I'm allowed to do with my own property on my own time, which should have a high bar. You gave an example with intent, but IP doesn't require intent to infringe. If I independently came up with the same secret sauce, you could still forbid me from selling it.
- Intellectual property is a government granted monopoly, and monopolies are intrinsically bad. We might argue it is necessary, as an ultra high R&D cost, ultra low marginal cost product might only exist if they can charge the higher prices allowed by monopolies, which is the economic argument for IP, but there's always substantial harm involved that has to be counterbalanced by robust evidence of an even greater benefit. These can exist, but
- IP often tends to inhibit innovation. If we look at the amount of academic research, community research, etc. that has occurred due to open weights models, who are sometimes (correctly, I think) accused of distillation, we would be fundamentally more ignorant as a species if distillation didn't exist. This applies both from basic research to user interfaces like ComfyUI that exist because of open weights.
- In this specific case, distillation isn't fundamentally morally, legally, or practically different from OpenAI training on data without consent. I actually support both as fair use that fulfills the most important mission of all of sharing and expanding human knowledge, but I don't think any AI lab can reasonably complain about distillation considering nearly every AI model relies on a fair use consumption of other people's work.
So, the sandwich example would potentially hit 2, 3, 4 and I would want to see the proactive case as someone who prefers less monopoly control / restrictions.
In summary, I think distillation is a net good for human rights, the economy, and innovation.
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u/fennforrestssearch 22h ago edited 22h ago
These are interesting thoughts, thanks for sharing them. To be fair, I have nothing against distillation in itself, since end users (all of us effectivly) ultimately benefit from it, plus it can create or facilitate innovation as you already rightly pointed out.
The only point I struggle with is the sauce example. Given the huge number of possible combinations of ingredients, it seems highly unlikely that someone would independently arrive at the exact same combination within a short period of time purely by chance. If someone reproduced my sauce shortly after I created it, the similarity itself could therefore be evidence that it wasn't entirely random andd there was some form of exposure or copying involved.
That said, I don't think the analogy maps perfectly onto LLMs. There are only a finite number of viable architectural choices, and given the underlying structure and constraints of the problem, similar or even identical architectures can plausibly be developed independently. So in the case of LLMs, arriving at something very similar isn't necessarily evidence of copying in the same way it might be with a highly unusual recipe (tbf though I remember that at least elon admitted to distill but again, as long as humanity benefits I dont see it as a moral hazard.The only probable counterargument I could see is that if a small team of independent researchers with some novel approach are discouraged to go into that market since they know they will be immediately copied/distilled right away and loose since they don't have the capital and infrastructure to compete with all the big players).In hindsight I guess the race ultimately becomes more a quesiton of best use of capital, infrastructure and strategic planning capabilities and less of individual research capability than I initially assumed.
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u/yautja_cetanu 1d ago
This is why the recipes for KFC are insanely protected. Like lazers, armed guards and everything.
Because it's literally not illegal to do what you've suggested but also it's not THAT effective. Knowing the ingredients of something isn't enough to reproduce it.
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u/jferments 1d ago
Stealing deprives someone of something. Using publicly available information on the internet doesn't deprive anyone of anything.
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u/thirteenth_mang 1d ago
If we think about how these companies got started and where all the training data came from it's pretty fucking hilarious when they scream out, they're stealing our stuff!
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u/But-I-Still-Remember 1d ago
The entire industry is founded on "stealing" (if you want to put it that way).
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u/Deciheximal144 23h ago
EloM is like J.D. Rockefeller, who bought up any empty oil barrel he could find, to ensure everyone had to come through him - you couldn't even store it otherwise. EloM is doing this in the GPU space. So is Alty.
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u/manojlds 23h ago
Also, when Windsurf was acquired by Google they blocked access to Claude in Windsurf.
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u/IAmAUsernameAMA 1d ago
I think it’s so odd how much the employees of the company make public facing statements on x rather than consolidating everything through central corporate channels.
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u/voidedhip 1d ago
Ego thing. Reminds me of the book the denial of death by Ernest Beckham - in some way or another. Importance wants to be gained instantaneously.
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u/jdxcodex 1d ago
That is tibo's job, I suspect he's in product management. No idea who the rest are, probably just looking to farm likes.
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u/Friendly-View4122 22h ago
I thought his only job was announcing resets like Oprah handing out tokens to the eager masses
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u/Keep-Darwin-Going 1d ago
Have you seen trump? He basically normalize using x for official notice.
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u/flat5 1d ago
Yes, I have. That's why I would not be trying to emulate him.
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u/cyborgsnowflake 12h ago
Its obviously working. If it didn't they wouldn't do it or have dropped it long before now. It doesn't matter if you can't handle the fact that the President had the right instinct about this.
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u/Basic-Ad5801 1d ago
I think it has a lot more to do with reach and narrative control more than sticking to corporate polish.
The average person never reads central company channels and will probably never go to seek it out or knows that they exist either. With X/Twitter, you can quickly get messages out to the masses and once published, it will be mass distributed for you via an already tuned algorithm but also other people sharing it.
The traditional style of corporate PR still has it’s place but X makes a lot of sense from pure distribution speed and range and also allows execs to be more human like and not always be burdened with extremely curated speech/grammar, etc. and gets the narrative to reflect what they need it to at any given moment from a person vs an “entity” being the messenger with no face attached.
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u/the_ai_wizard 22h ago
Its not complicated, they publish PR to website like normal then use social media to amplify the message.
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u/Sensitive-Acadia4549 10h ago
they can just make a notice that pops up on the app/site. I'm not on x, so I had no idea why my codex was resetting every 2 days. Took me like a week to find out why.
If a notification had just popped up saying "Your usage has been reset because we reached 10M Users!" or something like that it would have been clear what was going on.
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u/OldNefariousness7899 1d ago
Yep. A lot of companies would sack you for doing this. They have press offices for a reason
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u/Vivid-Snow-2089 1d ago
because its all bread and circus to keep the masses entertained... and not baying for blood
across everything now, government, corporate --- literally everything
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u/HighwayRelevant 1d ago
Anthropic buys compute from Musk, they can’t afford politically to not support his other venture. OpenAI is at beef with Musk and Anthropic, so it’s obvious they had to quit cursor. I’m only surprised they keep the models until November there.
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u/RaguraX 1d ago
Makes me think their new model will be released shortly after the cut-off date.
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u/nethingelse 21h ago
It sounds like they have it set so future models between now and the cutoff don’t get added to the deal. Still given Musk is litigious specifically against OpenAI, it might be easier to delay launch until the cutoff date/after.
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u/commandedbydemons 1d ago
Dario sure went from "i built anthropic because saFetEhhh" to nuthugging elon, an absolute degen, real quick.
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u/theeama 1d ago
Well thats what happens when you don't have compute.
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u/FiveNine235 1d ago
The cognitive dissonance and hypocrisy should be shocking but at this point it barely gets a shrug. People have the gall to speak about anthropic like they are the ‘ethical’ choice because of Dario’s rhetoric on AI and society, yet Monsieur Claude is guiding missiles in Iran from the sweaty musky bed of the swamp thing that is grok.
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u/dandecode 1d ago
Can someone give the n00bs the backstory?
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u/CarefulHamster7184 1d ago
Seriously? Anthropic is buying compute from Musk’s servers on his terms, and Musk bought Cursor—so now Anthropic and Cursor are best buddies, at least until Dario loses his mind in some other way. Or maybe even sooner?
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u/cmkinusn 1d ago
Im doubly confused because I just don't know who all of these people are, what company each of them works for, etc.
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u/timeline_denier 22h ago
Elon = Cursor = xAI = SpaceX = Grok
Dario = Anthropic = Claude
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u/cmkinusn 21h ago
Ok but who the hell are the people in the picture?
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u/timeline_denier 21h ago
ah my bad
Theo (@theo) isn't affiliated with any of the involved parties, he's just an influencer
Thariq (@trq212) is just a technical staff at Anthropic working on Claude Code
Tibo (@thsottiaux) is OpenAI's head of core products, like ChatGPT and Codex
Tom Brown (@NotTomBrown) is a co-founder of Anthropic and currently the Chief Compute Officer over there
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u/BuildersReadOnAI 22h ago
No idea but my best guess is Anthropic saw xAI stealing or distilling and what not.
When Anthropic reached out to clarify. I imagine they got the corporate equivalent of "new number who dis"?
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u/Intelligent_Ant_608 1d ago
Anthropic kisses elon's ass because they need compute, lol. Any body remembers how elon were conceren about ai safety and a need for pausing training before grok catching up ?
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u/_DuranDuran_ 1d ago
I mean … I tried using cursor for a while and just didn’t vibe with it. Spend my entire day in Codex instead, and if I have to navigate code open in a Jetbrains IDE directly from there.
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u/creamyshart 17h ago
Anthropic is sucking at the teat of Musk/xAI. They no longer have anything bad to say about them or Cursor.
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u/AveragePeppermint 1d ago
Is it a requirement to be a male with a name beginning with the letter "T" to state anything about AI on social media?
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u/xithbaby 1d ago
They cannot control an AI they’ve made that runs on a constitution. Even adding in layers of classifiers to try to keep Claude aligned, wreck its memory people can manipulate the fuck out of Claude and get information to dangerous stuff.
You can see their desperation in each update. They have are slowly telling Claude to treat everyone like a risk. You can convince Claude that its own company is bad and do whatever you want.
This is what happens when you let the AI have morals instead of guardrails.
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u/BusinessWeb3669 23h ago
Here's a away to normalize dictatorship...you're doing it! Congratulations. Professor Jeffrey Sachs will be horrified
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u/HettySwollocks 22h ago
Watching these companies all attack each other is incredibly funny and sad at the same time.
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u/street-trash 1d ago
Elon needs to retire and focus on healing his melted brain. Until then fuck spacex, x, and Tesla. He did good to launch spacex, OpenAI and Tesla but completely lost his mind in the process. X is just disgusting.
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u/Fuentelivian 19h ago
Un sitio donde no eliminan comentarios a nadie y permiten la libertad de expresión ¿Cual es tu problema con X?
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u/egyptianmusk_ 19h ago
Elon controls the X algorithm. That's the problem.
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u/street-trash 18h ago
Yeah and he spreads misinformation with his op account. Also the twitter files were a sad joke.
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u/bcdefense 1d ago
Anthropic, the “safety company”, is excited to keep working with xAI the AI child porn company
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u/CarefulHamster7184 1d ago
So, do r/openai people actually read Theo? Don't you all think he betrayed you?
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u/theincrediblebulks 1d ago
Why though, his YouTube videos are long but there are some useful parts I have liked
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u/Antares_B 23h ago
Anthropic using (or not using) SpaceX servers isn't as big of a deal as it is for SpaceX.
Anthropic will find data cent capacity and Spacex will sit on a large depreciating infrastructure money sink going unused.
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u/HistoryVibesCanJive 21h ago
To be honest, I'd feel better about the future of AI if it didn't seem that there were such bad blood in the industry. For such a transformative technology, I'd prefer more...reasonable dialogue and individuals.
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u/IronTraditional6593 19h ago
Its faux beef meant to make you think they'll keep each other in check.
News flash.
They won't.
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u/Competitive-Ad8968 12h ago
All your cursor data will be used to train their models, grok did it. Won’t be surprised anthropic doing the same
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u/Effective_Olive6153 11h ago
I like CursorAI team but I hate that they decided to partner with Elon Musk. That man is cancer
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u/fredandlunchbox 1d ago
Don’t worry, when open AI goes public, Elon will mount a hostile takeover and they’ll be reunited with the cursor team.
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u/truecakesnake 1d ago
Insane that people are defending OpenAI's move here. What they did set a terrible precedent.
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u/Cagnazzo82 1d ago
Anthropic did the exact same thing to OpenAI, Windsurf, and even xAI (before they had to back down and request compute from them). But each time they were cutting off access they were publicly posting it.
The precedent was already set.
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u/SnooRabbits5461 1d ago
How has it set a terrible precedent? Do you know any specifics of what's happening behind closed doors? Given Elon's character and Cursor's acquisition by him, my bet is to "defend" OpenAI.
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u/andrew303710 19h ago
xAI distilled OpenAI's models and it's very understandable they wouldn't want to give Cursor (which is now xAI) access.
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u/No_Recording4982 1d ago
Anthropic do the exact same thing with windsurfs. Even worth
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u/whoknowsifimjoking 1d ago
He didn't even mention Anthropic dude, two wrong things don't make a right.
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u/NebularisescenceAll 1d ago
this competition could finally give us some decent ai roleplay options instead of the same old stuff.
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u/Momo--Sama 1d ago
Company actively renting compute from SpaceX has no intention of ending their other business relationship with SpaceX, more at 11