> The difference I was referring to was economic; I was not making an ethical judgment

What is the economic difference? LLMs have been trained on the results of billions of dollars worth of time, research, investment and expenditure. When you ask an LLM a question, they are giving you the results of those billions, or hundreds of billions, effort.

Those things weren't free; they cost money to produce! If anything, the OpenAI and Anthropics of the world got more economic value for free than the people distilling them did.

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rmunn 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

It takes more computing power, and money, to pay for training an LLM, compared to distilling an LLM that someone else has already trained. That's the economic difference.

	▲	lelanthran 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> It takes more computing power, and money, to pay for training an LLM, compared to distilling an LLM that someone else has already trained. And that is still less money than it took to create that data in the first place, which the AI companies then gladly took to use for training.

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Tadpole9181 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Can you please stop being coy and intentionally obtuse? Just have a discussion in good faith, I'm so beyond sick of this kind of rhetoric.

Yes, AI training uses human data and a lot of it was not compensated. But that has absolutely nothing to do with the thing this thread is about.

Distilling models costs less money than a really procuring quality data and training a model yourself. If you disagree, debate that.

	▲	cindyllm 43 minutes ago \| parent [-]
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