Elon Musk testifies that xAI training Grok on OpenAI models

OpenAI and Anthropic have been on a path to counter third-party efforts to train new AI models by launching chatbots with their publicly available APIs, a process known as “distillation.”

These discussions are limited to Chinese companies using distillation to create rich open models that are as good as US offerings, but available at a much lower price. However, the technology industry thinks that American labs use these methods against each other to avoid falling behind their competitors.

Now we know it’s true in one instance: On the stand in a California court On Thursday, Elon Musk was asked if xAI has used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he confirmed that it is a trend among AI companies. When asked if that meant “yes,” he said, “No”.

Musk is in an OpenAI countermeasureCEO Sam Altman, and Greg Brockman, saying they violated OpenAI’s original non-profit mission by transitioning the organization to make a profit. The trial began this week, with testimony from the technology leader.

Musk’s endorsement is notable because distillation threatens the AI ​​giants by destroying the opportunities they have built by investing in computing. This allows other developers to create models that are capable on the cheap. There is no joke here, because of the bending and breaking of copyright laws by borderline labs in search of enough data to train their models.

It is not surprising that Musk’s xAI, which started in 2023, many years after OpenAI, tried to learn from the leader who was in the field. It is not clear that distillation is illegal in its own right, but it can violate the company’s laws that are imposed on those who use their products.

OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google he says launched a project through the Frontier Model Forum to share information on how to deal with the distillation experiment from China. This often involves interrogating the species in detail to understand their inner workings. In an effort to curb the effort, border laboratories are working to prevent users from asking too many questionable questions.

OpenAI did not respond to a request for comment on Musk’s admission at press time.

Later in his testimony, Musk was asked about what he said last summer that xAI would soon surpass any company other than Google. In response, he ranked the world’s leading AI developers, saying Anthropic was the leader, followed by OpenAI, Google, and China’s open source brands. Known as xAI as a small company with only a few hundred employees.