GoKawiilNvidia's Jensen Huang calls AI model distillation 'competition,' not theft
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang told CNBC that training AI models on the outputs of other companies' models amounts to competition rather than theft, pushing back on Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent's July characterization of the practice as theft. Bessent had threatened sanctions against overseas firms using distillation to extract capability from U.S.-built AI models. Huang said companies studying and even reverse-engineering Nvidia's own products is something he'd rather avoid but accepts as part of competition.