The distillation explanation is classic American exceptionalism: No one could possibly do anything unless they were copying American leaders (where "American" means a bunch of Chinese, Canadian, Europeans and Indians working in the US).

It's also a bit of securities defensiveness. Pretending that you really do have a super moat, people just keep swimming in it so you just need to add more alligators.

It's farcical. Anyone who has worked on large models knows that the premise that an almost-Fable model was trained with distillation is beyond ridiculous. It's theoretically possible if they spent tens of billions of dollars on API calls, but it isn't the magic that somehow these people keep convincing people it is.

Previously Anthropic has reported on some Chinese firms doing chicken-shit level of API calls, that at most would be doing some Q and A or final fine tuning. The notion that they're training these models via it is fantastically ignorant nonsense that only very ill-informed and gullible people fall for.

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villish 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> Previously Anthropic has reported on some Chinese firms doing chicken-shit level of API calls, that at most would be doing some Q and A or final fine tuning

"Anthropic said the campaign was conducted between April 22 and June 5, 2026, and generated more than 28.8 million exchanges with Claude through almost 25,000 fraudulent accounts."

I don't know why you're trying to downplay it.

European models are so far behind because they don't resort to these tactics on a massive scale. Basically every other country is entirely dependent on 2 countries for frontier AI.

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hnfong 9 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> European models are so far behind because they don't resort to these tactics on a massive scale. Basically every other country is entirely dependent on 2 countries for frontier AI.

You may or may not be factually correct in your other points, but you're really proving the GP's point here regarding American exceptionalism.

	▲	villish 8 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Are there other countries releasing frontier level models? Mistral is the only relevant player I can think of that comes from Europe, did I miss one?

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llm_nerd 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

>I don't know why you're trying to downplay it.

Ignoring that I have literally zero trust in anything Anthropic has to say on this -- they have been doing the hysterical routine and trying to get every bit of government granted monopoly they can[1] -- those numbers still simply aren't that impressive.

>European models are so far behind because...

What a non-sequitur. Europe, like much of the West, foolishly delegated tech, media, payment systems, etc, to the United States. European efforts on this are poorly funded, poorly capitalized, and marginal efforts.

China is very much not Europe. China is looking to leave the US to the dustbin of history, and their efforts are a little more concerted.

[1] Surely Americans are aware that Anthropic and OpenAI are both very close to getting the US government to ban and fully criminalize the open Chinese models, right?

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thesmtsolver2 14 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

China goes even further lol

https://m.economictimes.com/industry/renewables/china-wto-co...

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ultrablack 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Which Chinese model was it that identified itself as Claude 15% of the time?

	▲	inigyou 3 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Claude Opus identifies itself as Qwen if you ask the question in Chinese. So who's really distilling who?
	▲	llm_nerd 15 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Models don't have some self identity, beyond what is explicitly handed to them via a system prompt. There have been many, many cases of models identifying as different models by different makers as a basic identity hallucination. They train on enormous volumes of data including lots of people talking about certain makers and models (ChatGPT was actually a super common one given that it became the kleenex of the LLM world). Hence why vendors have to specifically tell it to override that, and if they don't you get lots of funny cases of identity confusion. This isn't the big gotcha some people seem to think it is, and the whole news cycle about that was mostly by people who have no idea what they're talking about. It's actually a meaningless data point. But it's precisely the sorts of people who think that a few thousand free accounts surreptitiously snuck off with Fable.