AI giants learn what everyone else on the modern internet already knows
Major AI companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, and Google are facing internal conflict as they accuse competitors of 'distillation,' a practice where one AI model learns from the outputs of another. This mirrors the ongoing controversy regarding AI companies scraping internet data without permission to train their own models.
Why it matters
It highlights the legal and ethical hypocrisy in the AI industry regarding intellectual property and data ownership as companies struggle to protect their proprietary research.
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Bloomberg/Getty Images A version of this story originally appeared in the BI Tech Memo newsletter. Sign up for the weekly BI Tech Memo newsletter here . Here's some delicious AI irony for you. For years, tech giants have argued that if information is available on the internet, it can be used for AI model development and outputs. They call it fair use . Content owners have tried to prevent this, with no success. Now Anthropic , OpenAI , and Google are discovering what the rest of the internet has already learned through painful experience: once you put something online, people will find ways to use it in ways you don't like and can't stop. The latest flashpoint is something called " distillation ," using the outputs of one AI model to improve another.
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