The Musk v. Altman trial continues to be a reminder of why tech folks don’t generally sue each other.

Lawsuits reveal a lot. It’s happened several times already in the trial that began with opening statements Tuesday, but perhaps the biggest revelation came on the stand Thursday, when plaintiff Elon Musk admitted to OpenAI’s attorneys that his xAI startup had, to some extent, “distilled” OpenAI’s models.

Distilling is the process of using a larger, more powerful model to create synthetic data that can be used to train another one. It’s a common practice in the AI world, but one that is becoming less and less accepted.

The US accused China of industrial espionage for this very practice. Many open Chinese models used American-made AI models for distillation.

Perhaps Musk feels that he has the right to distill from ChatGPT. After all, he helped start the company as a nonprofit and alleges in the suit it was “stolen” from him first. My guess is this will not be the last time we hear about xAI’s apparent shortcut with OpenAI models.

— Reed Albergotti