> they had no way to evolve past this stage of development
That infantilizes them, in my opinion. Their state then was an early state of many people around the world that made different choices that lead to different results. They made choices, those choices had consequences, and no one decided to do otherwise -- OR, if they did, they failed and have been lost to history. But lets not remove their agency.
The environment makes a very real difference to what outcomes are possible/likely. It is hard to create a complex society if there is little food surplus and no real way to store food long term.
PureRAW can now output linear DNG's compressed with JXL. It's amazing the first time you use it seeing 25mb RAW files go in, get made linear, and pop out 8mb or 9mb, then toss them in your RAW developer of choice and still find all the dynamic range and such you'd expect from the original RAW. I'd been doing that on my own with a script that called Adobe's DNG Converter, which has the same capability, to convert older versions of PureRAW's linear DNG to JXL-based DNG files, but that's no longer necessary.
Unfortunately, at least as of perhaps a year ago, I couldn't find any other actively maintained software tooling that could reliably do what Adobe's DNG Converter was doing, and there's so much nuance to the world of RAW files that's not at all just a trivial one-shot prompt to Claude/Codex to roll your own.
The camera's I've owned (Canon and, in more recent years, Olympus/OM System) all could do RAW, JPG, or RAW+JPG, or in some cases cRAW+JPG, with several quality settings available for the JPG side.
But remember, on a camera you're wanting to maximize battery life, image quality and certain key performance metrics. The OM-1 Mk II can burst up to 120fps of 20 megapixel images with locked focus or 50fps with continuous AF. Thats a huge amount of data to capture, process and write to media. I think we want cameras to optimize for that. It's trivial to dump the resulting files on your computer and then convert between formats to your hearts content.
People keep saying this without attribution. Meta and others got caught, and brought into court, over using torrented files. But those models trained on that data have long since been retired and replaced with new models based on new from-scratch training runs. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc all pay studios, newspapers, Reddit and others for access to data for training. They scrape the open web, but if that's illegal a court hasn't said so. The open web is open, after all. And they don't seem to be stealing books, they seem to be buying physical copies and scanning. Seems legit, that's what a human would do to learn from a book. They also pay big bucks for commercially curated data and training sets.
Just feels like there's enormous CCP effort to put their labs on equal moral footing with everyone else when it's not demonstrably the case. They want the West to hate themselves so we're happy to squander our technological lead.
> they seem to be buying physical copies and scanning. Seems legit, that's what a human would do to learn from a book
There’s still the open question on learn vs copy/mimic/repeat.
As a human, I can read a book I bought. I’m definitely not allowed to scan it and post its pages online and upload them to an archive of scanned PDFs without the authors’ and publishers’ permission.
IIRC the Meta legal case wasn’t even about LLMs, they just torrented and shared pirated files, whether with strangers or among employees. Those may or may not have been later used for training, but it was already illegal to just share among employees.
>I’m definitely not allowed to scan it and post its pages online and upload them to an archive of scanned PDFs without the authors’ and publishers’ permission.
That's explicitly not what they are doing. They are scanning it and then training on the scan. They are allowed to do this in much the same way you are: format shifting for personal use is also allowed (much as the DMCA likes to get in the way with DRM'd media).
I didn't realize Anthropic is a person and doing all of this for his/her/their personal use that is never shared with anyone else, and even more never for financial gain. What a fun hobby. /s
It might still be allowed for other reasons, but "personal use" isn't what they claim in court.
I am not allowed to read a book many times until I memorize it, and later record an audiobook of one of its chapters for money.
There really isn't any moral argument against distillation, which is itself pretty goddamn benign. It's pretty simple. Someone pays for Claude access. Claude outputs tokens that are not copyrighted. Then you train on those tokens, which doesn't create a derivative work in the first place.
Is it theft? Well, no. There's no authentication bypass here, no Claude model leak. At best it is violating the terms of use, kind of like how it is violating the terms of use to scrape many websites that AI scrapers scraped.
Is it immoral? Why would it be, exactly? Distillation is not a forbidden technique with moral implications. In fact, there is quite compelling evidence that Anthropic themselves were distilling from OpenAI in early Claude models. It helped them bootstrap if nothing else. There is no special moral code that makes distillation forbidden any more than training off of people's works without permission, or even express non-consent, is forbidden.
Really the more concerning aspect of this is the deception of using Kimi and expecting Kimi output and getting Claude instead, but I would like some independent confirmation that this is even something Moonshot really did before raking them over the coals, rather than just assuming it's true because Anthropic said so. How exactly did they figure out, considering ZDR? It deserves more information.
I do agree that there is a tendency for people to justify CCP human rights violations by trying to equate them to much lesser but similarly shaped transgressions from Western governments, but that's an unrelated issue entirely. The story regarding distillation is consistent: Sorry, but I can't afford enough tiny violins to express my lack of giving a shit. I harbor no ill will, I truly hope the golden parachutes that Sam and Dario fly out on are adorned with the finest materials.
Just because the material was legally required doesn't mean you can do anything you want with it. I can't (legally) buy a physical book, scan it, and put the scan on my web site. It seems to me that an LLM is a derived work of the training materials that went into it, and thus needs permission from the copyright holders.
But OK, the law seems to disagree with me there. But OK, let's say it's fine for AI companies to train their models on copyrighted content as long as they didn't torrent it or whatever. What then makes it illegal, or morally wrong, to do the same thing with their competitors' model outputs? Why is it OK for Anthropic to scrape this comment and feed it into their system, but not OK for Moonshot to scrape the output of Anthropic's system and feed it into theirs?
you can buy a book, scan it, and upload the counts of every letter, distribution of apostophies, use it as the input to some convoluted process to produce weights or a search index though. They got slapped for illegally obtaining the files, not for producing derivative works of them.
distilling another llm is a clear tos violation but no one really knows how much teeth those have. financially probably none all they can do is whack a mole on the accounts doing it which won’t work.
so they’re trying to lobby copyright changes i guess; unlikely to succeed as doing so would also make all search engines illegal
Not sure what part of my comment this is meant to address. I explicitly acknowledged that the law seems to consider this to be legal. My point is that if it's legal to feed random web sites into the training system, why would it not also be legal to feed competitors' model outputs into it?
Because it’s TOS violation. Anthropic have no agreed tos with the websites they’re scraping. The accounts being used to distill Anthropic’s models are all bound by their terms
That's a contract violation, not an illegal act. And I'd bet that plenty of sites that Anthropic et al have trained on have ToS that forbid using them for model training. This site does. Do we think the AI companies aren't training on HN comments?
While many things might be legal (or hasn't been ruled clearly illegal yet) /under different jurisdictions, we are still in the process of figuring out what we accept as ethical. As the output of models can't be easily copyrighted, destillation is equally disputed. Particularly if the primary model interaction was not destillation (as in this case) IMHO it will be legally quite difficult to restrict secondary use for training. In the end we have to find a legislation and probably even international treaties that account for the fact that classical copyright is beginning to become an obsolete concept.
If American AI labs can learn from the open web why can't Chinese AI labs learn from American ones?? The argument is that learning and distillation are transformative and legal, is it not?? What's good for the goose is good for the gander.
Except they use thousands of stolen credentials which is definitely not legal. They also don’t notify users they send data to US labs which can include sensitive information.
EU labs like mistral cannot legally do any of these things. So people cheerleading China for it is strange.
How does it erase the notion of competition driving down prices? Endpoints are largely compatible, so the code change required to switch from one to another is trivial. Don't load 6 months' worth of credit in an account, keep it tight. There's fairly little lock-in.
The most significant lock-in to me isn't even something you mentioned, but rather it's model related; I personally put a little time into trying to optimize my prompts every time I change models, as they all have their own unique... flavor.
As for tool calling errors, it seems like first party providers are among the best, I got the feeling that's what he was suggesting, though of course that's why you test. You can also go directly to Together.ai or whoever else you please.
Like others have said I think Openrouter seems neat for testing, but even just as a hobbyist I've been drawn to go direct to particular providers due to irritating little issues that I now see just weren't me.
>Endpoints are largely compatible, so the code change required to switch from one to another is trivial.
Wrapping a specific implementation in a neutral function is something you learn to do in year 1 of programming.
This specific issue and argument I see in lots of different aggregator dependencies, Terraform, LiteLLM/OpenRouter.
They promise to save some hypothetical work in the future if your boss asks to change vendors, and it turns out to be very trivial work that is just a regular part of our programming job, changing a couple of lines in order to change vendor.
It's worth noting that there exists a similar set of technologies with a reasonable tradeoff, using a framework that targets different user-platforms makes sense, write-once and deploy at iOS and Android is a reasonable tradeoff, but because you are deploying to those providers simultaneously and it's a user-choice so you don't get to pick one or the other (without losing clients), there's still arguments to chosing just one and losing market share, or doubling the workload and building native for both, but this is a true engineering choice. I feel like stuff like OpenRouter and TerraForm take elements of these frontend abstraction technologies and wastefully apply them to backend tech.
A particularly egregious case is when there's an aggregation layer for aggregation layers, say, a tool that generates TerraForm or Chef configs, or a tool that generates Docker and Podman containers, or a tool that generates LiteLLM/OpenRouter configs. Sounds dumb, but it happens when there's a market share for it. Can even get to 3 layers deep.
At the foundation might be an aversion to making an irreversible choice, which is an innate emergent psychological phenomenon, but is supported by the Bezos Amazon policy of reversible and irreversible doors. But again, even if you want to be light, using some of these aggregating tools isn't necessary, you can just build on top of a tech, and switch later. The only thing you get with an aggregating layer is that the API ends up being the common denominator so you lose out on the competitive advantages of each choice, or are forced to use even more complex API logic like LLM(commonParam1, commonParam2, vendorParams= {"vendor1"=:{"vendorParam1":"blabla"}} or worse, use hard-coded aggregator provided mappings between the aggregator API and the vendor API that may be incomplete and relies on updates from the aggregator dev.
I think OpenRouter’s value proposition is less about avoiding two hour developer tasks and more about having a single place to establish policy controls and dynamic selection based on current pricing and performance data. If you can’t actually do that - for the reasons described in the article you end up pinning - they can’t deliver. But it seems to work for some use cases.
Still the best way to ensure such policy control is to have 1 provider, tops 2 or 3.
Having a router thing that reroutes to 18 different vendors is of course no way to ensure any policy control, you can add all the internal buttons and dials on policy control and ISO and GDPR compliance, but all it will do is (incorrectly) check compliance box and increase compliance risk to the 18 different vendors.
In practice most openrouter users look for the cheapest vendor, and they tend to go for chinese vendors, who love to price dump and don't have the same views on contracts and IP as the west.
I really don't think time in this particular type is a factor. None of what I've heard or read has anything to do with familiarity with its unique systems. Everything sounds like sloppy flying. Sounds like he, the PF/PIC/Captain, started the descent late, stayed too high, didn't manage the power curve well, landed long and fast and willfully ignored his first officer. One bad decision after another where instead of properly correcting it or making the safe decision to try again he decided to plow onwards.
The training pilots go through to get type rated and to be allowed to fly by airlines is incredible. But knowledge is one thing, attitudes and behavior and truly taking safety to heart outside the sim is another. I bet this guy was slightly reckless in every model he's flown.
Another alternative is external social factors acting on the captain. Maybe he was distracted by personal issues. There again though, if you're not fit to fly that day, you call out.
Yeah, time in this type could be argued as a reason they weren’t properly configured or on a stable approach, but that is exactly why go-arounds exist. Mistakes happen, errors get made, so you go TOGA, fly a holding pattern until you get sorted, then try again. Happens at every airport every single day. No harm no foul.
That is not the reason this incident happened. This happened because the pilots continued to put it on the ground while ignoring at least a dozen clear and unambiguous indicators to abort the approach and go around.
Makes me think of my boy John Adams; "Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other." Moral relativism is emptiness all the way down, we're reaping what we sowed.
Not even remotely true. US cities are spread out because they could be, because the landmass is beyond the comprehension of someone if they never left the UK or western Europe. It takes nearly a full day of high-speed driving to cross Texas if you stop for some decent meals. Cities are spread out because, what, you expect a group of farmers out in remote areas to see their options as travel weeks on horse to a single distant city or set up a local community and decide to travel weeks every time they need something?
And that condition was true long before the last 50-60 years -- which, I mean, do you know what year it is? 60 years ago was 1966. Route 66 was famously a thing in the 20s, the modern highway system in the late 50s. Those things connected what already was happening, it didn't create the phenomenon from thin air. Of course cities/communities have tended to spread along the interstate highway corridors -- which tells you how much people value them -- but again, that was happening first. There's old neighborhoods in many older American cities (including my own that were built between 1890 and the 1920s) that look just like suburban ones -- small front and back yards, packed fairly close together -- that predate even widespread adoption of cars. Again, US policy gave the people what they were already desiring, in a more efficient way.
That's what you'd expect from representative government when its functioning. The people that spend the most time talking about a need to "reshape" things are typically taking a more autocratic, I-know-what-you-want-better-than-you-do paternalistic, anti-democratic approach.
The negative externalities? On net the benefits are enormously positive, which is why every community around the world down to the very poorest, even illiterate societies (ancient civs were mostly illiterate and still built extensive road networks) will start clearing paths to make transport easier. It's an enormous social net benefit, the free, fast, efficient movement of people from one point of their choosing to another.
The political left has really decided to go nuclear over Flock, but I'm not understanding the fundamental principle from which this view arises. Libertarian sorts don't like it either -- but that's entirely consistent with their entire existence. Is this a broad-based phenomenon on the left, or are sections perfectly fine with it? Some of the other comments here seem to endorse full on 1984-style surveillance, so perhaps this is just a libertarian-left-leaning Silicon Valley strain of leftism that's in revolt against Flock? While possible I don't traditionally see outfits like New Yorker falling in that category. When the worldview is very permissive of broad state power and often admiring of Europe, which has itself been struggling to fight off legislation weakening encryption, it's hard to make sense of this.
I'd be curious to see if Mamdani or someone similar employing Flock or an equivalent would yield the same firestorm; if not, then it's not a principled stand against surveillance, rather just another form of political warfare. Perhaps Antifa wants to not be tracked in certain locales, is less concerned in other politically favorable locales because they know they won't be prosecuted anyway?
My understanding is that broad state power to the benefit of the people, Scandinavia style, is not the same as broad state power to monitor and/or control the people.
Arguably those two types of power are in conflict in terms of desired outcomes.
In Texas the political right has just canceled some contracts with Flock.
One after only half the contract was up.
Looks like that was based on experience, there could very well be a lot more freedom & privacy-loving enthusiasts on both the left & right in Texas than average.
It's almost as if people can have a variety of opinions, and support institutions and states they don't agree with in every dimension. 'The left' is a wildly broad church, comparing 'the new yorker' with say 'the socialist workers party' adds more heat than light. Similarly 'Europe' is a very big and populous place, as is the subset of it that's in the EU. Most EU citizens very much oppose attacks on encryption, the digital millennium copyright act etc. Those are pieces of legislation pushed by the European Commission - a body that is not democratically elected.
Your line about capitalised 'Antifa' suggest an unserious lack of familiarity with left-wing groups and causes.
That infantilizes them, in my opinion. Their state then was an early state of many people around the world that made different choices that lead to different results. They made choices, those choices had consequences, and no one decided to do otherwise -- OR, if they did, they failed and have been lost to history. But lets not remove their agency.
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