American companies are spending enormous sums to develop high-performing AI models. Distillation attacks are attempting to maliciously extract them — and nobody is doing much to stop it.

I would reckon that China is perfectly satisfied to let us be the sole host of the thing that is rapidly destroying our economy and trust in all media from the inside out.

Yeah, because American LLMs are so immensely useful that people are throwing money at them.

Calling it a "Distillation Attack" is wild. Get fucked Anthropic.

Can China just steal what America just stole from everyone else?

yadayada, more moronic 'China baad' propaganda.

I truly wish they could steal it away.

Whoever wrote this article didn't even bother to do the most basic of research.

DeepSeek fully admitted they started with ChatGPT outputs to train its model. And then they released it as an open-source model, so that everybody else can "steal" their work. On the image/video front, the general public has created every possible variation on top of every model you can think of. On top of that, any model that has ever been released with full weights has been spun into whatever variation or VRAM size you want.

The ugly truth that the American companies want to hide is the fact that they are spending trillions of dollars on an oligopoly that they can't keep long-term. They hope that they can just keep spending more money to add more billions of parameters to their models, and keep technologically competitive with the secondary open-source models. But, they've already ran into diminishing returns over a year ago, and the global compute sector physically cannot keep up with demand for another cycle of even more diminishing returns.

The other factor is that realistic miniaturization of models is already here. Some of the smaller sizes aren't as effective as the 250GB models they use on cloud-based services, but you can still do a lot with a 16GB or 24GB video card, using models of those sizes. Optimization and LLM quantization is getting better and better each year. The AI bubble burst is going to force a cascade shift into a new era of localization. Everybody is sick to fucking death of renting and subscribing to everything. Us pirates already do so on the media front, and soon localization of LLMs is going to become way more popular.

The question isn't "Can people steal the tech?". It's "how long will people notice that it's already happening?"

This article should be titled undertaxed american corporations waste trillions on ai.

Models getting better does give extra information for making newer models better too. China publishes far more advanced research than US models "steal", and they open source exceptionally strong/fast models that US can also steal from.

China is 38%, and growing, of the world's investment in LLMs

Most of that goes toward implementation (data centers) and chip manufacturing. China is making money on compute services and maintaining capability parity on software the good old fashioned pirate way merely to prevent a technology gap with the US, as is their way.

If they open source it then that's a win. Closed source models don't help anyone because when the company goes bust they need to be reinvented again. People like to talk about the advancements capitalist industry has made but if they never publish any of it because of "tRaDE sEcrETs" they might as well have never done it because the next person will have to reinvent it when they go bust or kill it for money.

That is not "allowing us to be the sole host of the thing that is destroying our economy and trust in all media from inside out". That is keeping parity with it. China is also having major issues with fabricated media from AI. The Chinese government has also latched on to AI, as many others, to manipulate media, and many other police state things. Their economy is heavily, heavily, invested in the success of llms. When this bubble bursts, it will be bad for every major economy on earth, as they are all disproportionately invested in this.

Oh no, wouldn't anyone think of the billion dollar companies? The Chinese are stealing the models that they have spent so much effort on getting all the training data. What a shame.

Nobody is doing much to stop the American AI companies crawling the web to scrap tons of licensed content to illegally use in their training, either.

Some of the terms that have been coined to describe stuff related to AI are just so funny.

"Prompt injection attack", also known as... asking nicely for the chatbot to do a thing.

"Host" was certainly poor wording as one of it's other definitions is literally data center services, I meant to refer only to the siting of software research which the headline calls the "AI brain".

And yeah I agree on ultimate trajectory, AI offerings are 95% folly and it's now so big that even countries who haven't integrated their economies with the sector will feel the pain when it collapses, China will not be immune. Though they will probably just stumble while the US will completely face plant.

Real talk, who cares? As an end user, more competition is good. Plus, the Chinese models tend to not care about copyright infringement, so you can make some truly amusing memes.

They stole our brain? Wasn't that a Star Trek episode?

Brain and brain, what is brain 🧠?

It's only really capitalist AI bros who care about this and are crying about it. Most of us are cheering for it because it means more open source models, and OpenAI's wet dream of being able to block people from using AI is dead or dying fast.

Developing tech is expensive. Recreating it is not. It’s always been that way and always will be.