News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16. Parent comment

Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by trollbridge on Thursday July 23, 2026 @05:15PM (#49028153) 

  *Chinese lab releases open model weights*
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by thesmtsolver2 on Friday July 24, 2026 @12:50AM (#49031328) 

  *Shuts off Internet access to Chinese labs (womp womp, no blatant distillation of US models)*
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by willy_k on Friday July 24, 2026 @08:08AM (#49034410)
And what’s wrong with distillation? In its own right, and especially considering how those models were trained in the first place - in what world is it right that US firms are free to use copyrighted / otherwise non-public works however they like, while others are ostensibly in some moral wrong for just using the product (completely normally) and then using the outputs in a way that threatens US firms.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by thesmtsolver2 on Friday July 24, 2026 @09:10AM (#49035033)
Who said blatant distillation was wrong?

It just shows that Chinese “labs” are dependent on the US.

Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by willy_k on Saturday July 25, 2026 @11:37PM (#49054458)
> Also, from a scientific perspective, distillation is decades old and contributes nothing scientifically.

Distillation itself does not, but it does enable research by allowing more teams to play around with models that follow the frontier, as opposed to completely independent training including scaffolding up w/ synthetic data.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:DARPA, U.S. Air Force fly AI-controlled F-16 by trollbridge on Friday July 24, 2026 @02:08PM (#49039500)
They can simply host the models somewhere like Singapore and then sell the service from there. I mean, my Xiaomi account gets routed through Singapore.
[ Parent | on HN ]