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Comment by bananzamba | Hacker News Reader

How are they trusting Google not to destill them

This is speculation, but funnily enough Gemini models show the least evidence of being distilled from OAI or Anthropic compared to everything else in the market.

I feel this is correct. Google has probably the most data of any company in the world. For better or worse, they don't need to train on the outputs of other models.

At a org like Google Cloud barring rogue L5/6/7s acting on their own any sniffing of distillation will get leaked. Too many chaos exist at a org size of Google to systematically do it given the contract at hand. This is a company where every spicy memo or mild gossip will risk leaks.

Probably a very strict contract, and letting OpenAI read all the session logs like they do for their own customers.

GCP already hosts Anthropic models so probably trusts and lawyers.

Nvidia GPUs let you load encrypted weights onto them and to decrypt on chip so Google would need to have some sort of Nvidia management firmware attack to read from HBM while the GPU is live

Doesn’t really matter what happens at the GPU level when Google can see all API traffic.

Except google cloud doesn't use Nvidia GPUs but TPUs.

Google has both. Afaik we don't know whether OpenAI models will run on TPUs or GPUs here.

I bet it would be the NVIDIA, at least initially, not for the encryption capability per se, but for simple fact that adapting to TPU at high performance is non-trivial.

Isn't distillation more of a black box type affair?

Distillation does not require access to weights.

Contracts and lawyers are more powerful than any technical tool.

Yeah like the copyright lawyers of content owners that got their works trained on?

How many trillions of dollars were those content owners worth?

Enough. They just weren’t working in coordination.

You are vastly overestimating the power of publishers. The top book publisher in the US is worth $5 billion. All publishers together are about $50 billion. The New York Times is $11 billion. Fox is about $15-25 billion. Add together every single book publisher, newspaper, magazine, TV/radio, digital publisher and really every print and broadcasting platform in the country and you’d reach about $100-$150 billion. That is roughly 3% of Google.

These companies have a ton of cultural capital, sure, but in American capitalism that means nothing.

First answer this: How are they trusting OpenRouter not to distill them?

Open router doesn't host the models, so they wouldn't have access to the weights or reasoning traces right?

They can still collect (input,output) pairs.

OpenRouter doesn't see the encrypted reasoning traces.

But they do see input and output, which gives them a treasure of training data.

I'd bet the distillation balance-of-trade goes the other way on that one

Google Cloud couldn't give a shit about Google Deepmind, and backdooring Clouds customers only stands to hurt Cloud.

America is a high-trust society.

More like - America is a high-litigation society.

I don't believe threat of litigation alone explains the extent of it.

The way an American company, esp a reputable one like Google, conducts itself internally is different. There will be much more internal backlash to do the wrong thing way before litigation.

That's Hollywood narrative for you. Lawyers want cases with damaged plaintiffs and work on contingency.

Japan is a high-trust society. America is the opposite.

Everything is relative, but fair enough.

The US is medium trust.

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