Why pay to distill models if labs add no value? Outputs compress billions in compute and RL
flowersslop · x · 2026-10-03
Responding to the argument that distillation should be allowed because big labs merely claim copyright over freely available human knowledge, flowersslop pushes back: if labs truly add zero value and just resell free internet knowledge, why are companies so desperate to pay for distillation instead of finding the same knowledge for free?
His answer: model outputs compress billions of dollars in compute, licensed data, RL, post-training, and engineering — far more than a repackaging of public information.
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