> China is not competing, it is distilling US models.

I think you should check your notes. The likes of Kimi K2 thinking shows up as high as the second best general purpose model currently in existence. It seems they compete just fine.

If you believe "distilling" is all it takes to put together a model at the top of any synthetic benchmark then I wonder what you would have to say about all US models that greatly underperform in comparison and still manage to be used extensively in professional settings.

But your argument is an emotional one and not rarional, isn't it?

> high as the second best general purpose model

According to benchmarks which are gamed to the extreme these days. Trusting them blindly isn’t exactly rational either. They don’t necessarily translate that well to real world tasks

It’s obviously not “distilling” as such but there are reasons why Chinnese models are consistently several months behind OpenAI/Antropic