It's like sideloading. It's very hard to fight against the marketing budget of big tech

I love how some of the biggest advancements in llms came from the Chinese labs, yet people still jump to distillation being unreasonably effective. Distillation is very good at creating smaller models from large ones sure, but nothing to me indicates it is 'unreasonably effective' compared to all the other bells and whistles being iterated on

Let's face it. Chinese labs made some of the biggest advancements. AND training on Claude (or GPT) output IS unreasonably effective. The two sentences are true at the same time.

This article shows that when Kimi3's chain of thought is prefilled to match Opus's, the rest of the chain of thoughts Kimi3 outputs very closely aligns with Opus's. That seems strong evidence that Kimi3 is partly a distillation of Opus. And Kimi3 is not a small model. No doubt a lot of hard work went into Kimi, but seems clear that distillation was used effectively as well.

(though maybe there's another interpretation of the thought alignment?)

Didn’t Kimi3 release a week before opus 5?

They compare it to Opus 4.8 in the article, which has been available for a few months now.

But they don't perform the same test on other models as far as I could tell? So we don't lnow if this is peculiar to kimi models or not.

I hesitate to nitpick with regard to something legal, given your username, but what makes this different from hiring a consultant with the agreement that their final output belongs to you, but you don't get access to their internal processes, tooling, notes, etc? Or a photographer where you get final edited prints, but you don't get the raw photos?

Your examples are cases in which you know what the bill is going to be before placing your order. With LLMs, you're paying per output token, not per request, yet you don't get all the tokens.

When you hire lawyers or consultants you usually don’t know how many hours they’ll bill you. It will depend on developments in the case that you cannot in general predict. For example if the other side files a motion and your lawyer has to argue against it, they’ll bill you for it.

Sure you can set spending limits, just like you can make an account and give it a limited amount of credits.

Or a huge software company where you only get the end operating system, but none of its source code.

Buy the Neiman Marcus cookies and feel entitled to the recipe?

Lots of secret sauce in the world.

> If they charge by the token, all your tokens are belong to you

I’m not sure this argument is correct. You can sign whatever contract you like with the model provider, right? Including “you are entitled to the end product but not the intermediate scratch work”?

Coming from a place of genuine curiosity: is there some precedent or statute that would invalidate that contract? I don’t see why the reasoning tokens belong to you.

For example, I pay lawyers by the hour but don’t necessarily own their meeting minutes, recorded discussions, research notes, etc.

Sure, but the current one is charged per token in & token out. Not per completion / task / hour / whatever. You can't charge per token and then say "you stole that token". Again, they can unilaterally decide not to sell you tokens anymore, at any time, for any (legal) reason. But as it stands right now, it can't be stealing.

Read the TOS. It can absolutely be stealing.

Are you a lawyer?

Breaking a platform's ToS is a civil contract violation, not a criminal offence. Stealing is. Potato, avocado.

Again, I’m genuinely curious: can’t two parties sign a contract that says “you pay for all tokens required to produce the answer, but you only get the final answer tokens”?

My understanding of US law is that there’s nothing in logic or precedent that makes such a contract unenforceable.

As for whether it’s “stealing”: they might be able to press charges under federal Trade Secret Theft laws, I’m not sure. But I’m not seeing how you can be so very very certain that it’s at best a civil violation of contract. What’s the reason for your confidence that a judge would never find this to be trade secret theft or economic espionage?