I wonder if they ever will be. If the chinese open source models are only 3-6 months behind every major frontier model release, I can't see the business model. GLM-5.2 is supposedly on par to Opus depending on the case. And everybody and their mother can run that model in their datacenter and charge Dollars for tokens.

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est31 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

There is distillation going on where chinese providers give the model lots of outputs. We don't live in a world where chinese providers are not doing this so we can't compare the advantage of this distillation, but there is some advantage to it otherwise they wouldn't do it.

If Anthropic can block distillations somehow (which are fair game imo given that Anthropic et al did the same with the written works of mankind), then they might stop or slow down the chinese from catching up.

Chinese also have like 40% of the AI researchers of the world, plus they have access to a lot of cheap labour for writing training data. I'm sure an hour of training data creation from one of China's 162 million university educated people is much cheaper than an hour of work from one of US's 97 million. Probably still cheaper than someone from the grand area.

China is behind in AI chips/GPUs but they are catching up. One thing where they have a hard dependence on outside is their energy imports: they have to import a lot of stuff from third party countries. The US on the other hand is energy self sufficient.

	▲	littlecranky67 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Stopping distilation is a condradiction to growth: The more active users Anthropic gets, the easier it will be for chinese companies to distile the model. Heck, I can see a paid browser extension being issued that does nothing but send copies of your AI chatbox prompts+results to China - with a "hidden" feature that creates distillation prompts every now and then. Give each 5$ a month for installing the browser extension, and you got an unstoppable distillation botnet.
	▲	nylonstrung 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		I think the panic around distillation misses the fact that US labs also benefit heavily from Chinese breakthroughs like Deepseek's work on sparsity, MoE and training architecture It may be that US labs use Chinese models for distillation but we'd ofc never know because they can host the models themselves
	▲	torginus 2 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		I think it's quite hard to block distillations, and everyone is distilling, even unintentionally. If you feed the most recent Github repos into the training, most of that code will be written by frontier LLMs. Training on that is distillation.

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tryagainian 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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