Were they kneecapped by Anthropic blocking their distillation attempts?

What Anthropic was complaining about is training on mass-elicited chat logs. It is very much a ToS violation (you aren't allowed to exploit the service for the purpose of building a competitor) so the complaint is well-founded but (1) it's not "distillation" properly understood; it can only feasibly extract the same kind of narrow knowledge you'd read out from chat logs, perhaps including primitive "let's think step by step" output (which are not true fine-tuned reasoning tokens); because you have no access to the actual weights; and (2) it's something Western AI firms are very much believed to do to one another and to Chinese models all the time anyway. Hence the brouhaha about Western models claiming to be DeepSeek when they answer in Chinese.

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red2awn 4 hours ago | parent [-]

The "distillation attacks" are mostly using Claude as LLM-as-a-judge. They are not training on the reasoning chains in a SFT fashion.

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zozbot234 3 hours ago | parent [-]

So they're paying expensive input tokens to extract at best a tiny amount of information ("judgment") per request? That's even less like "distillation" than the other claim of them trying to figure out reasoning by asking the model to think step by step.

	▲	red2awn 31 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		LLM-as-a-judge is quite effective method to RL a model, similar to RLHF but more objective and scalable. But yes, anthropic is making it more serious than it is. Plus DeepSeek only did it for 125k requests, significantly less than the other labs, but Anthropic still listed them first to create FUD.