Tech article
Y Combinator’s Garry Tan wants US open-weight AI labs to ‘distill’ frontier models, too
Publisher description: Tan wants smaller, American open-weight AI labs to use the same kind of training techniques on American frontier AI labs, giving the U.S. a more robust set of open-weight options that aren’t Chinese.
TechCrunch | Sep 11, 2026 | Julie Bort
Automated excerpt
When it comes to Chinese AI labs using distillation techniques to extract knowledge from frontier model makers, Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan is hoping regulators stay out of it. It is commonly, and legitimately, used by AI labs to help train new models. To be clear, Tan isn’t advocating for American AI labs to use stolen credentials to distill.
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