Snapshot · The a16z Show
A significant and growing share of new internet content is AI-generated, which itself feeds back into training future AI models, compounding the distillation dynamic.
Where this was said
At 20:05 · chapter starts 19:25
The distillation debate is one of the episode's richest segments. Krishnan starts by resetting the framing: distillation — learning from the outputs of other models — has been foundational to AI development since the beginning. [1] — Sriram Krishnan "Chinese AI companies can distill reasoning traces from American models with little consequence. Meanwhile, a Silicon Valley startup trying …" 22:10 Every model from the original GPT to Claude bootstrapped itself from human knowledge crawled off the internet. And now much of that internet is itself AI-generated (AI slop), which feeds back into training. Krishnan amusingly reveals he once ran his own tweet through an AI detector to confirm it read as human-written. The real issue, he argues, isn't distillation per se — it's the asymmetry. Chinese AI developers can freely harvest reasoning traces from American frontier models, while U.S. startups face genuine legal uncertainty about whether they can distill from other American models. [2] — Sriram Krishnan "Uneven distillation playing field for U.S. vs. China: Chinese AI developers can freely distill reasoning traces from American models, while…" 22:10 He credits Sequoia's Dean Meyer for articulating this clearly in a recent post, and Ben Thompson of Stratechery for reaching a similar conclusion independently. The solution: enshrine distillation rights for American model developers to level the playing field. The irony he notes in passing: current American open-weight models themselves use Chinese models as teacher models in fine-tuning, highlighting just how entangled global AI development has become.
Every major AI model, from the original GPT to Claude, has been trained through distillation from human-generated internet content, making distillation an inherent part of AI development.
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