alt Hacker NewsSo, OpenAI and Anthropic say the Chinese models are only as good because they distill their models. How true is that. I am sure it adds something. But is it more like a marginal 1% improvement or something really significant?
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if distilling was so easy and could give you frontier LLM on openai/anthropic output, then how come there are no hundreds of frontier labs in the US market, all distilling and competing for the TRILLION dollar market valuation ????
its all bs spread by oai/anthropic in order to ban open weight models and monopolize the market for two US companies and protect their trillion dollar valuations
I also don't believe it, if it was as easy as that, we would have hundreds of competitors.
The truth that Anthropic and OpenAI will not say, is that these Chinese labs have a lot of talented people.
OpenAI's Head of Strategic Futures just this week posted this about the latest Kimi release: "It's a very good model! I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that."
It was part of a longer post that kicked off quite a firestorm about open models and OpenAI's position on them, but it's also notable that labs are no longer contending that open models are essentially just distilled versions of frontier models: https://x.com/deanwball/status/2078133895766114412