OpenAI and Anthropic have pushed the US government to address the distillation of their top models by Chinese companies, framing the practice as a threat to national security and prompting Trump officials to threaten sanctions on Chinese companies.
But there’s also a way to use technology to solve the issue, OpenAI President Greg Brockman told a roomful of reporters on Thursday. “AI is going to be an important priority for national competitiveness, so it is reasonable for the public to really care about these questions, but in terms of solving it, ultimately, there is a technical question.”
Brockman said the company has systems in place to prevent distillation. It’s a process the company outlined in a letter to Congress in February, and includes using machine learning and human review to identify when users are scoring the models’ responses, attempting to extract reasoning, and generating large amounts of synthetic data — all warning signs for distillation.
Brockman also used the OpenAI briefing, which centered around GPT-Live and new voice capabilities, to push back on the idea that it’ll be undercut by Chinese models on price. “It’s not the case that open source models are magically cheap,” he said. “Everything is running on the same hardware.”
OpenAI is building out that hardware business — chips and data centers — as its moat, he said. “Now that people actually care about price, which was not the case three months ago, we are delighted,” he said. “Our goal is to always be the cheapest model for any task you want, and we have extremely advantageous conditions to deliver on that.”