Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants U.S. open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too
Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan advocates for an American 'distillation regime' to allow U.S. AI labs to train models using frontier AI outputs. This contrasts with calls from companies like Anthropic to restrict such practices due to security and intellectual property concerns.
Why it matters
The debate over AI model distillation touches on the balance between open-source innovation and the protection of proprietary technology.
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.
“I would do nothing,” he told CNBC in an interview earlier this week . “We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime.”
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.
Distillation is when a model maker extensively prompts another model in order to learn how it works and reasons. It is commonly, and legitimately, used by AI labs to help train new models.
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