NEEDLE IN A HAYSTACK
Technologists said blocking distillation may be harder than it looks.
One of DeepSeek’s innovations was showing that a relatively small number of data samples — fewer than one million — from a larger, more capable model could drastically improve the capabilities of a smaller model.
When popular products like ChatGPT have hundreds of millions of users, such small amounts of traffic could be hard to detect — and some models, such as Meta Platforms’ Llama and French startup Mistral’s offerings, can be downloaded freely and used in private data centers, meaning violations of their terms of service may be hard to spot.