Given the short-term pragmatic, conflicted way that AI tech adoption is happening... won't encouraging distillation effectively taint the entire space of open weights models, with the undisclosed biases of a few models that are under the influence of parties (certain billionaires and politicians) known for aggression and duplicity, and not for admirable ethics?

Following news of companies and projects increasingly moving to open weights models.

As AI gets more central to society, we really need to know how the weights were determined.

Open weights isn't just "free as in beer"; it can be "free as in the mystery drug that creepy guy chatting you up at the bar offered you". And maybe even he doesn't even know everything that went into the tablets, since he too was being worked, by an organ-theft ring who will be harvesting both of you tonight.

That's an analogy to get your attention. Your LLM probably isn't going to steal your organs. But in the current environment, it does and will have ideological biases determined by those with direct and indirect influence over it. And there will be a massive market for commercial influence biases (look at how previous generations of adtech invaded almost all technology companies). And there's incentive for military and spying capabilities to be buried in the models, perhaps as long-term sleepers. Maybe some organized crime trojans, too, depending which model you pick up.

In this low-trust environment of the current real world, we need genuine open source models, not closed "open weights", and not mindlessly distilling black boxes gifted by sketchy powerful interests.