Why you should be careful about LLMs that imitate ChatGPT

This article is part of our coverage of the latest in AI research.

The success of large language models (LLM) such as ChatGPT, Bard, and Claude has sparked efforts to replicate their capabilities. However, these LLMs are black-box APIs, and their creators share very little information on model architecture, weights, and training data.

To overcome these limitations, researchers have developed several innovative techniques. Among them is “model imitation,” in which developers fine-tune a pre-trained model on examples extracted from the black box model whose capabilities they…