Overview
- Musk, testifying Thursday in a California federal court, said xAI "partly" used OpenAI models to help train its Grok system.
- Distillation uses answers from a large "teacher" model to teach a smaller "student" model, which cuts computing costs while keeping much of the skill.
- OpenAI’s terms forbid using its outputs to build competing models, though reporters note the legality of distillation remains unsettled.
- Frontier labs have tried to block mass-query distillation, with OpenAI and Anthropic naming Chinese firms and Anthropic cutting off coding access to rivals including xAI.
- OpenAI did not comment at press time, with the Oakland trial over Musk’s claim OpenAI abandoned its nonprofit mission now putting safety and competition in the spotlight.