Abstract:
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang was a guest on a TV show on September 28, local time. When asked whether model distillation was considered "robbery," he responded: "This is called competition. You can test other companies' products as much as you like."
Huang Renxun made an analogy with Nvidia's own situation. He said that in order to understand the working principle of NVIDIA products, some companies "disassembled and analyzed NVIDIA products until almost only the skeleton was left." He admitted that he did not like to see such behavior, but also admitted that "competition makes everything better."
Subsequently, Huang Renxun gave a realistic solution: "If you don't like this situation and don't want others to use your products, you just need to understand your customers and close the corresponding services." This statement shifted the responsibility from legislative prohibition to contract and technical control, which essentially reserved space for an open ecology.
Knowledge distillation is a classic technology proposed by Turing Award winner Hinton. It uses the output of a more capable teacher model as a soft label to train a smaller student model. The process does not involve directly copying the source code or weight parameters. It has long been mainly used for model compression and lightweight iteration.
The real disagreement lies at the enforcement boundary. Distillation that follows the API agreement and is carried out within the scope of the license is usually regarded as a general research and development path; bypassing the risk control mechanism through batches of fake accounts and proxy IPs, and large-scale capture of closed-source model output is clearly suspected of violating the service agreement.
It is worth mentioning that there is a clear difference between Huang Renxun's statement and the narrative in Washington in recent months. In July 2026, U.S. Treasury Secretary Bessant called distillation "theft" and threatened to sanction overseas companies that draw technological capabilities from U.S. self-developed models.
Huang Jen-Hsun advocates bringing the dispute back to the commercial contract framework and using service terms rather than legislative bans to resolve the issue. For Nvidia, this position is in its ecological interests, but the difficult question of "how to define compliant distillation" has not been solved, but has been transferred to the terms of service and enforcement measures.
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