I must say that this AI thing is going more or less as I felt it would back about a year ago. I think there is no real moat in AI models. It's a commodity and the big labs have predictably been caught in a race to the bottom. Not sure if this is going to turn better or worse for all of us common folks. I must say I'm a bit happy though in the sense that "intelligence" is not going to be controlled and be rented out by a small minority.

The Chinese labs have shown that distillation is incredibly effective, but the major US frontier labs haven’t (yet) been incentivized to shrink their models in the same way.

This model might be the first step in that direction, as competition heats up between OpenAI and Anthropic.