Elon Musk testifies that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models
Elon Musk testified in a California federal court that his AI company xAI has used distillation techniques to train its Grok model on OpenAI's models, acknowledging such practices are common among AI firms. His testimony came during a lawsuit alleging OpenAI strayed from its original nonprofit mission by becoming a for-profit entity. While distillation may violate terms of service, it is not clearly illegal and allows companies to build competitive models at lower cost by leveraging existing systems.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
OpenAI and Anthropic have been on the warpath lately against third-party efforts to train new AI models by prompting their publicly-accessible chatbots and APIs, a process known as “distillation.” That conversation has focused on Chinese firms using distillation to create open-weight models that are nearly as capable as U.S. offerings, but available at a much lower cost. However, tech workers have widely assumed that American labs use these techniques on each other to avoid falling behind competitors. Now, we know it’s true in at least one case: on the stand in a California federal court on Thursday, Elon Musk was asked if xAI has used distillation techniques on OpenAI models to train Grok, and he asserted it was a general practice among AI companies.
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