Y Combinator's Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to 'distill' frontier models, too | TechCrunch
When it comes to Chinese AI labs using distillation techniques to extract knowledge from frontier model makers, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is hoping regulators stay out of it. In fact, he thinks U.S. AI labs should perhaps play the same game. He elaborated to TechCrunch that this means he wants smaller, American open-weight AI labs to use the same kind of training techniques on American frontier AI labs, giving the U.S. a more robust set of open-weight options that aren't Chinese. Anthropic this week released its second report alleging that Chinese labs are engaged in 'illicit distillation attacks,' hiding their identities to distill without permission and relying on fraud and stolen credentials to do so. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei had previously publicly called on U.S. regulators to crack down on distillation. To be clear, Tan isn't advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill. He wants them to be free to come in the front door. In fact, his argument is...
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