Distilling distillation
A Reuters review adds ammunition to claims that China is distilling US models
An article in Reuters, based on a review of “more than 80 Chinese academic papers and patents,” adds some weight to the claims that China is using a process called “distillation” to extract capabilities from US frontier models and use them in domestic models.
Distillation is a common research technique in machine learning, whereby you query an AI model over and over to produce a large set of outputs. You then train a smaller model directly on those outputs, often allowing it to imitate the problem-solving skills that produced them. It’s kind of like a larger model teaching a smaller model.
But, as in the cases identified by the Reuters review, distillation can also be used to copy some capabilities from the most powerful models, without the cost of training them from scratch. Because of this, it’s a sort of loophole in access restrictions and export controls; you get some of the same capabilities without needing nearly as much computing power for training. Reuters linked many of the cases revealed in the reviewed documents to the Chinese military.
That said, distilled models generally fall short of the original; you can’t replicate the entire model, just some of its capabilities. On the flip side, distilled models may lose some of the original model’s attempted safeguards.
In my view, one of the most important lessons is this: the US can’t keep model capability domestic. This weakens the justification for pushing AI models further and further due to fear of China “getting ahead.” I’ve never found this justification compelling to begin with, since the race to superintelligence is a race with no winners. But for those who do, as my colleague Joe wrote back in June, distillation means that “one of the main drivers of Chinese AI progress is American AI progress.”
The analyses and opinions expressed on AI StopWatch reflect the views of the individual contributors and the sources they cover, and should not be taken as official positions of the Machine Intelligence Research Institute.