| ▲ | NiloCK 6 hours ago |
| Grey market fast-follow via distillation seems like an inevitable feature of the near to medium future. I've previously doubted that the N-1 or N-2 open weight models will ever be attractive to end users, especially power users. But it now seems that user preferences will be yet another saturated benchmark, that even the N-2 models will fully satisfy. Heck, even my own preferences may be getting saturated already. Opus 4.5 was a very legible jump from 4.1. But 4.6? Apparently better, but it hasn't changed my workflows or the types of problems / questions I put to it. It's poetic - the greatest theft in human history followed by the greatest comeuppance. No end-user on planet earth will suffer a single qualm at the notion that their bargain-basement Chinese AI provider 'stole' from American big tech. |
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| ▲ | jaccola 6 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| I have no idea how an LLM company can make any argument that their use of content to train the models is allowed that doesn't equally apply to the distillers using an LLM output. "The distilled LLM isn't stealing the content from the 'parent' LLM, it is learning from the content just as a human would, surely that can't be illegal!"... |
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| ▲ | amenhotep 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | When you buy, or pirate, a book, you didn't enter into a business relationship with the author specifically forbidding you from using the text to train models. When you get tokens from one of these providers, you sort of did. I think it's a pretty weak distinction and by separating the concerns, having a company that collects a corpus and then "illegally" sells it for training, you can pretty much exactly reproduce the acquire-books-and-train-on-them scenario, but in the simplest case, the EULA does actually make it slightly different. Like, if a publisher pays an author to write a book, with the contract specifically saying they're not allowed to train on that text, and then they train on it anyway, that's clearly worse than someone just buying a book and training on it, right? | | |
| ▲ | BeetleB 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | > When you buy, or pirate, a book, you didn't enter into a business relationship with the author specifically forbidding you from using the text to train models. Nice phrasing, using "pirate". Violating the TOS of an LLM is the equivalent of pirating a book. |
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| ▲ | mikehearn 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | The argument is that converting static text into an LLM is sufficiently transformative to qualify for fair use, while distilling one LLM's output to create another LLM is not. Whether you buy that or not is up to you, but I think that's the fundamental difference. | | |
| ▲ | zozbot234 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | The whole notion of 'distillation' at a distance is extremely iffy anyway. You're just training on LLM chat logs, but that's nowhere near enough to even loosely copy or replicate the actual model. You need the weights for that. | |
| ▲ | budududuroiu 5 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has affirmed a district court ruling that human authorship is a bedrock requirement to register a copyright, and that an artificial intelligence system cannot be deemed the author of a work for copyright purposes > The court’s decision in Thaler v. Perlmutter,1 on March 18, 2025, supports the position adopted by the United States Copyright Office and is the latest chapter in the long-running saga of an attempt by a computer scientist to challenge that fundamental principle. I, like many others, believe the only way AI won't immediately get enshittified is by fighting tooth and nail for LLM output to never be copyrightable https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell... | | |
| ▲ | roywiggins 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Thaler v. Perlmutter is an a weird case because Thaler explicitly disclaimed human authorship and tried to register a machine as the author. Whereas someone trying to copyright LLM output would likely insist that there is human authorship is via the choice of prompts and careful selection of the best LLM output. I am not sure if claims like that have been tested. | |
| ▲ | mikehearn 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | It's a fine line that's been drawn, but this ruling says that AI can't own a copyright itself, not that AI output is inherently ineligible for copyright protection or automatically public domain. A human can still own the output from an LLM. |
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| ▲ | vessenes 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| Just to say - 4.6 really shines on working longer without input. It feels to me like it gets twice as far. I would not want to go back. |
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| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | If that's what they're tuning for, that's just not what I want. So I'm glad I switched off of Anthropic. What teams of programmers need, when AI tooling is thrown into the mix, is more interaction with the codebase, not less. To build reliable systems the humans involved need to know what was built and how. I'm not looking for full automation, I'm looking for intelligence and augmentation, and I'll give my money and my recommendation as team lead / eng manager to whatever product offers that best. |
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| ▲ | throwaw12 5 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| not allowing distillation should be illegal :) One can create 1000s of topic specific AI generated content websites, as a disclaimer each post should include prompt and used model. Others can "accidentally" crawl those websites and include in their training/fine-tuning. |
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| ▲ | miohtama 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| In some ways, Opus 4.6 is a step backwards due to massively higher token consumption. |
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| ▲ | nwienert 6 hours ago | parent [-] | | For me, it's just plain worse. | | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 5 hours ago | parent [-] | | Try Codex / GPT 5.3 instead. Basically superior in all respects, and the codex CLI uses 1/10 the memory and doesn't have stupid bugs. And I can use my subscription in opencode, too. Anthropic has blown their lead in coding. | | |
| ▲ | toraway 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Yeah, I have been loving GPT 5.2/3 once I figured out how to change to High reasoning in OpenCode. It has been crushing every request that would have gone to Opus at a fraction of the cost considering the massively increased quota of the cheap Codex plan with official OpenCode support. I just roll my eyes now whenever I see HN comments defending Anthropic and suggesting OpenCode users are being petulant TOS-violating children asking for the moon. Like, why would I be voluntarily subjected to worse, more expensive and locked down plan from Anthropic that has become more enshittified every month since I originally subscribed given Codex exists and is just as good? It won't last forever I'm sure but for now Codex is ridiculously good value without OpenAI crudely trying to enforce vendor lock-in. I hate so much about this absurd AI/VC era in tech but aggressive competition is still a big bright spot. | | |
| ▲ | cmrdporcupine 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I like using Codex inside OpenCode, but frankly most times I just use it inside Codex itself because O.Ai has clearly made major improvements to it in the last 3 months -- performance and stability -- instead of mucking around trying to vibe code a buggy "game loop" in React on a VT100 terminal. | | |
| ▲ | toraway 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | I had been using Codex for a couple weeks after dropping Claude Code to evaluate as a baseline vs OpenCode and agreed, it is a very solid CLI that has improved a lot since it was originally released. I mainly use OC just because I had refined my workflow and like reducing lock-in in general, but Codex CLI is definitely much more pleasant to use than CC. | | |
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