> Distillation ... reflects a long tradition of learning from, building upon, and improving existing technologies, a tradition that has helped drive innovation since the rise of the open-source software movement. By contrast, unlawful efforts to extract value from closed models raise legitimate concerns. Those concerns should be addressed through targeted legal and commercial frameworks rather than sweeping restrictions on techniques that play an important role in AI innovation.
Sounds like they are saying "please protect our IP theft" that created closed weight frontier models in case we arbitrarily decide to close our models. But don't get rid of distillations in general so that we can all also keep benefiting from open models. We don't want to lose the ability to benefit from the work of others as we launder IP into closed models.
Surprised Linux Foundation kept their name on it with that.
i've said this in other comments but the fact that these companies are trying to align with open-source when there's no "source" included with their models is pretty damning. I think it lays bare the absence of any kind of noble or righteous motive with respect to distillation.