AI models can be trained from other AI models.
That makes for much more efficient (cheaper) learning, and potentially more compact models.
It is legal, moral and business "gray zone".
Initial AI training is on public data, protected or not, free or not.
Without open source projects AI would not be able to learn to code.
Why not "give back" in one way or another?
China has different objectives, and can subsidize AI...
It is messy and complicated period, unlikely to get clearer any time soon...
Knowledge distillation - Wikipedia
In machine learning, knowledge distillation or model distillation is the process of transferring knowledge from a large model to a smaller one. While large models (such as very deep neural networks or ensembles of many models) have more knowledge capacity than small models, this capacity might not be fully utilized. It can be just as computationally expensive to evaluate a model even if it utilizes little of its knowledge capacity. Knowledge distillation transfers knowledge from a large model to a smaller one without loss of validity. As smaller models are less expensive to evaluate, they can be deployed on less powerful hardware (such as a mobile device).
Model distillation is not to be confused with model compression, which describes methods to decrease the size of a large model itself, without training a new model. Model compression generally preserves the architecture and the nominal parameter count of the model, while decreasing the bits-per-parameter.
Elon Musk testifies that xAI trained Grok on OpenAI models | TechCrunch
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. Asked if that meant “yes,” he said, “Partly.”
OpenAI Misses Targets, Codex vs Claude, Elon vs Sam Trial, Big Hyperscaler Beats, Peptide Craze - YouTube