Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too
TL;DR
Tan 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. The technique in question is distillation, which most frontier labs prohibit in their terms of service.
Nauti's Take
The potential is concrete: open models with Western provenance reduce vendor dependency and give small teams real fine tuning control. The risk is legal, because distilling from frontier models runs against their terms of service and invites litigation.
For companies the practical move is to test open models while demanding documented provenance for the training data.
Summary
Tan 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. The technique in question is distillation, which most frontier labs prohibit in their terms of service.
Sources