People are getting it wrong; Anthropic doesn't care about the distillation, they just want to counter the narrative about Chinese open-source models catching up with closed-source frontier models

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Ok_Knowledge_8259@reddit

I mean didn't DeepSeek release R1 before Anthropic had anything? and in relatively short order behind OpenAI. If they were just distilling, Anthropic would've beat deepseek to the punch but they didn't. It's clear there really isnt any great MOAT, it's just clean data, more data, and RL. Scale those 3 up and you get better models. Sure there might be some things unknown in there but the chinese seem to be doing just fine. It's also the case that we haven't seen any open source in America or Europe coming remotely close to what the Chinese are doing. Arguable seed dance is SOTA in video right now and thats clear innovation.

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Lissanro@reddit

Yes, DeepSeek R1 release made quite an impact. It is also interesting that there is evidence that Anthropic distilled the DeepSeek model - [https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1r9se7p/claude\_sonnet\_46\_distilled\_deepseek/](https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSeek/comments/1r9se7p/claude_sonnet_46_distilled_deepseek/) \- and more than that, DeepSeek also innovate architecture and training methods, as well as in terms of training - and they open sourced a lot, published research papers with actual details. Meta tried to copy DeepSeek architecture, Mistral also released something based on DeepSeek architecture, but Moonshot was very successful on improving upon DeepSeek work, which shows how important open research is.

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SeaBat2035@reddit

Mistral was the first with MOE. DeepSeek borrowed that idea... don't change the narrative.

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saintshing@reddit

Mixture of Experts (MoE) was originally invented by Robert Jacobs and Geoffrey Hinton (often referred to as the "godfather of AI") in their 1991 paper, "Adaptive Mixtures of Local Experts". Key figures in the development and evolution of MoE include: 1991 (Origin): Robert Jacobs and Geoffrey Hinton introduced the foundational concept, with contributions from Michael I. Jordan and Steven Nowlan. 1994 (Hierarchical): Michael I. Jordan and Robert A. Jacobs developed the "Hierarchical Mixtures of Experts". 2013-2017 (Deep Learning Integration): Researchers including David Eigen, Marc'Aurelio Ranzato, and Ilya Sutskever worked on integrating MoE into deep neural networks. 2017 (Sparse MoE): Noam Shazeer and colleagues at Google Brain (including Geoffrey Hinton and Jeff Dean) introduced "Outrageously Large Neural Networks: The Sparsely-Gated Mixture-of-Experts Layer," which enabled scaling to billions of parameters.

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buildcool@reddit

See, Lebron never did that.

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Forsaken_Nature_7943@reddit

lol,very droll

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Karyo_Ten@reddit

Mixtral 8x22b predates DeepSeek MoE

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Karyo_Ten@reddit

People downvoting you don't know about Mixtral 8x22b

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wanderer_4004@reddit

I think that is exactly why Dario now comes out with this accusation. It is just what their PR specialists told them to do - make a counter accusation and make sure all mainstream media prints the Anthropic version. Journalists don't know that for a real distill you need access to the lower layers of the model and not just some synthetic output. Also a few million examples is nothing for a 1000B model. If someone indeed used distillation, then it can only be Anthropic - because they can use the open weight models for doing so. And likely they did for Chinese training data - because certainly the Chinese companies will have better training data for Chinese.

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FPham@reddit

It's not an accusation if the other side doesn't give two shaits about it. In fact they told you all along.

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stddealer@reddit

Training on synthetic data from another model doesn't necessarily mean distillation. This goes both ways btw.

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Howdareme9@reddit

that isnt evidence, llms hallucinate that all the time i would genuinely say that deepseek is the only chinese lab that can compete w/o distillation though

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LevianMcBirdo@reddit

While I agree that this isn't evidence at all, your claim is also not based on anything

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postacul_rus@reddit

ByteDance can also clearly compete, but I don't like them since they are closed source

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porkyminch@reddit

I think even if they *were* just distilling Claude, if Minimax or Deepseek or whoever has a comparable product to Claude Sonnet (let alone Opus), that's kinda huge. Minimax has a 100 prompt/5 hours plan for $100 *a year*. An equivalent plan from Anthropic costs that much per *month*. If you can get 80-90% of the performance for 1/12th the cost, that's gonna be more than worth it for a lot of people. If they're beating out the US labs on cost, that's still leapfrogging them imo. There are plenty of use cases out there that people are hungry for tokens and unable or unwilling to pay Claude/ChatGPT prices.

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jamfold@reddit

Chinese labs have a hit job to do. Find a US lab that is about to make big money, then distill their model to crash prices so that they never make that money. It's a happy race to the bottom

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postacul_rus@reddit

Sounds amazing, ngl

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porkyminch@reddit

Yeah, right. Like oh no, cheaper SOTA class models. What a travesty.

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thatsnot_kawaii_bro@reddit

No youre supposed to cheer the companies making billions off pirated data and comparing you eating food to the power they need for their data centers.

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findingmike@reddit

Faster tech cycle = faster race to the bottom on price.

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corruptboomerang@reddit

I'm still surprised none of (or all of) the major universities haven't 'partnered' with the AI companies they have massive amounts of good Pre-AI training data in student assignments etc. And can provide more (well not entirely AI-free).

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OftenTangential@reddit

Pretty sure that's a FERPA violation

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Far-Low-4705@reddit

GLM is very likely to have distilled claude. If you copy and paste claude's system prompt, it behaves identical to claude, which is something most models do not do. it will even tell you about tiananmen square.

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jackmusick@reddit

Both GLM and Kimi claimed to be “Claude from Anthropic” until very recently. I’m pretty sure Kimi still does. On top of China having a repeated track record of blatantly copying American tech for as long as I’ve been alive, even so much to have guys copying Steve Jobs’s look, Apple Stores, keynotes and devices down to the last detail. Why are people going out of their way to pretend this isn’t likely? You can dislike these companies all you want and even not care how much they get ripped off. Let’s not pretend it’s not real. Everyone can suck for different reasons at the same time.

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boredquince@reddit

Claude also claimed to be deepseek which probably means they did the same but worse. They used an open source model to create a closed model and sell it at a premium. These companies (openai, Google, Anthropic) ripped internet/books without paying and built a CLOSED MODEL. China paid for API access at least and their models are OPEN. sure they're not doing it out of the goodness of their hearts, it's to mess with US companies. at least the world gets something out of it and reduce wealth accumulation (probably not)

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4baobao@reddit

the difference is that the chinese companies actually paid for the data, unlike anthropic

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polytique@reddit

DeepSeek used ChatGPT models as well to bootstrap their reasoning model. They went through an Azure API. https://www.reuters.com/world/china/openai-accuses-deepseek-distilling-us-models-gain-advantage-bloomberg-news-2026-02-12/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-probing-if-deepseek-linked-group-improperly-obtained-openai-data-2025-01-29/

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Cuplike@reddit

>DeepSeek used ChatGPT models as well to bootstrap their reasoning model. Completely baseless claim. R1 was the FIRST model, closed or open source to show the reasoning tokens fully. They couldn't have copied ChatGPT even if they wanted to

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artisticMink@reddit

They synthesized their training data from GPT-4. No thinking involved in that sense.

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StillVeterinarian578@reddit

Maybe, but accusations != proof. Besides, even if they did, it's Just Robin Loxely robbing from the Sheriff of Nottingham.

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mynameis_twat@reddit

I don’t think they’re saying it’s bad, just that they won’t be able to surpass them from distillation and will need to innovate in other ways.

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Sir-Pay-a-lot@reddit

Feels a little bit like the Germans copying the first steam engines from Great Britain by looking at it at thinking about it.

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iaNCURdehunedoara@reddit

OpenAI accusing deepseek doesn't mean anything considering that they have half a trillion dollars spending to justify.

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davikrehalt@reddit

"If they were just distilling, Anthropic would've beat deepseek to the punch but they didn't." I disagree with your argument -- it doesn't contradict the hypothesis that deepseek distilled from OAI while anthropic was behind. Not even weighing on this hypothesis on either side; I'm just saying logically it doesn't follow

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dark-light92@reddit

Deepseek couldn't as there was nothing to distill from. Openai didn't show reasoning traces to public.

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TenshouYoku@reddit

This. How do you even copy something that is completely invisible to the outside? o1 never showed its reasoning, Claude didn't *have* a reasoning model, and bam Deepseek comes out with a reasoning model they literally show all its reasoning processes straight in the open. While Deepseek probably did do some scraping from their answering the key technology very likely was actually their own research, which is what scared the bajeezus out of them as, as it turns out, the yellow people simply are smart enough there is no moat to keep themselves in the lead for long.

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davikrehalt@reddit

I heard rumors there was some way to leak the reasoning traces.... idk if true though -- again I'm not picking a side here

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dark-light92@reddit

We don't need to speculate. Deepseek told us exactly how they did it in their technical report.

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sparkandstatic@reddit

Yeah there is no research in the fields, different algorithms don’t scale up to differences, only engineering and data cleaning, And your limited closed knowledge.

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Old-School8916@reddit

there is plenty of research, but most of it not applicable.

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sparkandstatic@reddit

Yeah, many are incremental insights and discovery. But the key ones of the many will nail it. So what’s your point

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Front_Eagle739@reddit

To be fair mistrals devstral models are very strong for their size, especially if you force reasoning on. We just dont have half a dozen different well funded companies giving us options. Will grant you the video gen though. Nothing anywhere close to seed dance

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Spara-Extreme@reddit

I think it’s a huge amount of cope to say that Chinese models aren’t distilling SOTA closed source ones. Chinese researchers are on the record stating that they can’t train models due to hardware shortages and then for them to pop out competitive stuff isn’t magic. There’s no secret sauce to math.

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_ytrohs@reddit

And how could you possibly catch up when they’re buying ALL THE POSSIBLE CAPACITY

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FPham@reddit

Bro doesn't know we all do it. A synthetic dataset doesn't mean it is made of polymer goo.

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awebb78@reddit

Spoken like a true Anthropic stooge. Saying that the Chinese Labs have no innovation proves this guy's braincells aren't functioning correctly. I've read quite a few papers from Chinese Labs and they do indeed come out with innovative discoveries, not just in AI models, but also in robotics. Anthropic people are really full of themselves.

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agent00F@reddit

Somebody actually asked this clown whether he'd go on the record that anthropic had never distilled other company's models, and of course crickets.

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amandalunox1271@reddit

Seems primarily strategic in their pettiness, given the timing. They do this before big releases to undermine opponents. Previously it was the 5.3 release from OAI and now it's the imminent v4 from DeepSeek. Worse of all their narratives are manipulative and aimed primarily at their dumber users. But now even their 4.6 Sonnet is showing significant signs of distilling from GPT5.2's output. Ironic how this little diss is coming out at the same time.

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awebb78@reddit

Yep, exactly. They have always been a petty company with petty founders that see themselves as better than everybody else. I like how Theo Browne put it on Youtube. They behave like a cult. He likened them to the cult of Scientology, and this line of thinking makes so much sense.

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aeroumbria@reddit

If they hadn't helped prop up the joker in charge of the US right now, many of the exact same scientists in Chinese labs could very well be working for them instead.

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awebb78@reddit

I partly agree. I certainly would have made it asier to work for them. But I also think there are many that are driven to work on open ecosystems, and Chinese tend to be more collectivist than we Americans who are driven by individualism. All of our model companies are into hoarding wealth, power, data, research, basically everything.

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Altruistwhite@reddit

They do have a sota model though

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awebb78@reddit

I'm definitely not saying that they don't have a good model, but saying that Chinese Labs have no innovation and can only copy off of distilled responses is just ludicrous. In fact Chinese Labs are catching up to the American labs so fast that I fully expect them to overtake the American Labs in a year or two, especially with all the resources and government support being poured into these labs by the Chinese government. We are coming to the end of the scaling era so it is going to come down to true research capabilities and we really know nothing about Anthropics research prowess because they never publish meaningful research. The Chinese Labs publish a shitload of research and are doing more with less, which will be where the real AI future lies. The Chinese Labs are now catching up with the American Labs on really meaningful benchmarks and use cases, so these proprietary model companies (maybe with the exception of Google because they have a massive data, application ecosystem, and hardware moat) are starting to feel the pressure. And investors can't keep pouring the same amounts of money that they have before. I believe Anthropic is coming out with all of this "AI is dangerous" and "everybody is ripping off our models" messaging because they want to heavily regulate AI to protect their market position. Anthropic is fucked long term, and I believe they know it.

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-p-e-w-@reddit

Indeed. “No innovation” is laughable. DeepSeek’s papers have dwarfed Anthropic’s in importance over the past year, in particular their novel attention mechanisms. Most of Anthropic’s publications are thinly-veiled ramblings about how dangerous AI is.

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Optimal-Builder-2816@reddit

yeah I actually think leapfrogging can happen through distillation, in fact.

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Far-Low-4705@reddit

by definition, it cant. a distill can never be as good as the original model.

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--Spaci--@reddit

With only sft it cant but with reinforced learning and alot of compute its very possible.

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Far-Low-4705@reddit

yeah, i never said that wasnt true. But if you train it on your own after distill, its not really strictly a distill anymore

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milo-75@reddit

You’re assuming there’s no automated way to improve a model created from distillation. But we know RL can be used to improve reasoning. Imagine if DeepSeek had come up with the RL technique before OpenAI figured it out. They could have used OpenAI and/or anthropic to create a distilled model that they could have iteratively improved using RL(OpenAI used RL to improve gpt-4 after all). The result could have plausibly been better than any of the models that were used to build the original distillation training samples.

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Far-Low-4705@reddit

then its not really a distill anymore, it went through its own training on its own data. it's now a finetuned model based on a distilled base model.

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Optimal-Builder-2816@reddit

It just needs to be good enough. There’s many many tradeoffs worth making here. It doesn’t need to be identical to be useful.

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Odd_Steak5893@reddit

While critics claim distillation is nothing but Anthropic's hypocritical maneuver, isn't their disregard for PII principles far more troubling?

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Defiant-Snow8782@reddit

Then why are they distilling Deepseek? https://preview.redd.it/m94z5imzxjlg1.jpeg?width=1080&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=cdaaacdf2eac618c9555d7703ca9a9b897ed2b8b

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SkillInfinite1605@reddit

Fuck Anthropic! They stole data to train their models without any permission, so its the wild west from now on! Hope these Chineese companies suck them dry of tokens! This is poetic justice and capitalist hipocrisy at its finest! AI companies have zero etics and its so amusing seeing themselves cannibalising each other’s.

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Sagyam@reddit

Who cares if it's distilled, fermented, brewed. As long as they keep releasing open weight sota models or try something new its all good. If you think they only do distillation then read these papers. \- [DeepSeek-OCR](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2510.18234), [mHC](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02556), [DeepSeek Sparse Attention](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.02556) \- [Muon Clip Optimizer and agentic post training](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.20534) \- [Lightning Attention](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2501.08313) \- [Qwen3 Omni Multimodality](https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.17765)

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Fault23@reddit

\+ releasing game changer detailed research papers frequently

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drinknbird@reddit

But there's no way Anthropic would read, "distill the information, and benefit from these papers! They've built their models from scratch and definitely just happened to build large language models at the same time as everyone else from their own ideas! /s

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stealstea@reddit

A distinction without a difference. What matters to the market it’s not how the Chinese models are getting very close to the state of the art models, It’s that they are. Pointing out that they are borrowing heavily from the state of the art models is about as useful as saying Chinese car companies stole a lot of ideas from western car companies. Of course that’s true, but doesn’t make a difference to the fact that Chinese car companies are now eating up the market and crushing the margins of western companies. Any evaluations that depend on a large moat existing will collapse.

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Infamous_Mud482@reddit

What they're describing is a routine aspect of collecting data to augment for RLHF purposes. They use data like this from other platforms, as do every single one of their competitors. It's a complete joke the way they're framing things.

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RemarkableAntelope80@reddit

Doesn't attack imply that it's done with malicious intent? Oh, and also not something they're already doing themselves with everyone's data anyway.

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ross_st@reddit

It's because if you can make Claude from Claude output, that ruins their whole thing about Claude being an entity.

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Upstairs_Ad_9919@reddit

It's just pathetic from Anthropic, that's all. They see they're losing their advantage and have much higher costs, so they lash out against competitors that are even open-weight. How pathetic—and what a sign of fear of competition.

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artisticMink@reddit

I mean, they're kinda right? Chinese models were in part able to catch up so quickly because they used synthetic training data from western companies. I don't condemn that. In this space, everyone steals from everyone. But i also wouldn't champion chinese companies because they would lock that shit down just as anthropic does the second they're ahead. No need to simp for big tech, be it western or chinese.

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IamTetra@reddit

correct, there is simply no space to have a moral appeal in tech, morals simply do not exist here. It’s brutal. It’s cut throat and honestly you look weak when you bitch and moan about someone taking your stuff when you are likely guilty of it yourself.

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Irisi11111@reddit

This statement is purely bullshit. You can say it's to some extent unfair to distill knowledge from Claude. However, Chinese models offer detailed architectural designs and cookbooks as feedback to their community, unlike Anthropic.Anthropic's inner workings remain completely opaque, including its models and any potential for accessing unauthorized information.Even if they claim to never use shadow libraries, how can we be certain?

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olearyboy@reddit

Anthropics board is beating them up over f-ing up with openclaw and releasing a poor version with coworker This is their distraction

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mromanuk@reddit

Yes, I'm wondering what they would say when the next LLM from China becomes SOTA?

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RevealIndividual7567@reddit

People need to understand that anthropic and even openai have a vested interest in ensuring the perception of people is that chinese ai is merely copying the work of frontier US labs like anthropic, as the future valuations of these companies depend on the market seeing them as the sole torch-bearer of innovation in this space and therefore the best companies to invest in.

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dmter@reddit

but distillation is just a way to overcome lack of training data. underlying architecture may be better in distilled model which might allow the distilled model to generalize better. so i would disagree that being a distill automatically means lower quality. it's just about who stole more copyrighted training data, not superior architecture.

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cleverusernametry@reddit

Go look at published papers and citations first

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octopus_limbs@reddit

That has nothing to do with open source though

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Round_Ad_5832@reddit

i still don't understand why distillation is good because i thought synthetic ai generated data is poison to AI.

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iMakeSense@reddit

Honestly same, waiting for the explanation comment.

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AutomataManifold@reddit

Turns out that synthetic data does kill the long tail distributions and cause [model collapse](https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07566-y)...but human curation and keeping a mix of [real images](https://openreview.net/forum?id=JORAfH2xFd) in the training data can prevent the collapse.

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TechnoByte_@reddit

That paper is very outdated and misleading They trained OPT-125m on its own outputs. A 0.1B LLM from 4 years ago is barely capable of generating coherent text, of course it's gonna collapse if you train on its gibberish outputs

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Due-Memory-6957@reddit

You got it wrong, the one making the affirmation that it's bad is who needs to prove it, specially when models have been training on computer generated data for years now and only get better.

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nuclearbananana@reddit

That's an outdated belief that came out of early panic of the web being filled with AI slop. People though it would lose the variety of human data and repeat errors and eventually cause model collapse. In reality every lab uses a ton of synthetic data. You can guarantee it's high quality and exactly the topic you want and teach the model all sorts of things for which there isn't a lot of literature. It's primarily used in post training state, so they still use a the variety of human data in pre-training. You can still see aspects of the "poison" people were afraid of. That's what AI slop like "not x but y" and other LLM-isms are. It's a collapse of diversity in language and it is genuinely harming even the way humans speak because we use LLMs so much.

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Due-Memory-6957@reddit

Yup, the consequence is that a lot of models ended up sounding like chatGPT since they were all training on it's data (with some people pretending they were going back to using the first Llama, as if!), but none ended up worse at realizing their tasks than before.

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Due-Memory-6957@reddit

Why would it be? Because drawers wish it so despite practical evidence of the opposite?

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RuthlessCriticismAll@reddit

> because i thought synthetic ai generated data is poison to AI You thought wrong.

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Vegetable_Prompt_583@reddit

That's a great question but Distillation dataset is used in Post training to achieve human like language and structure. Without Post training,the models are just auto completing sentences,as they say a statistical parrot. An LLM without proper Specialized fine tuning, RLHF have no understanding of question,answer, reasoning or tools.

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Round_Ad_5832@reddit

oook makes sense so its only used in post training not used as actual training dataset.

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Vegetable_Prompt_583@reddit

Yup. It's the Pretraining where they feed models any kind of garbage dataset in simple text format. SFT or RLHF is very structured and consists of Jsonl files with clear labels of What to respond,how to imitate thinking and so on.

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Azuriteh@reddit

Well the thing is that good synthetic AI data is not poison, most people get this wrong and expect models to eventually collapse into slop, but if it were true GRPO wouldn't have worked at all (an oversimplification of course).

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No-Understanding2406@reddit

genuinely curious why everyone assumes anthropic *doesn't* care about the distillation itself. 16 million API calls isn't cheap to serve, and they're literally subsidizing their competitor's training runs. that's not narrative, that's just money leaving the building. the "they just want to restrict china" angle gives anthropic way too much credit for strategic thinking. these are the same people who accidentally published their source maps and then DMCA'd 400 repos. this reads more like a company that got pantsed in public and is now trying to look tough about it. also the irony of posting this take on r/LocalLLaMA - the sub that exists specifically because people want to run models that were probably trained on distilled outputs from frontier labs - is *chef's kiss*

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TechnoByte_@reddit

> 16 million API calls isn't cheap to serve And the API isn't free, they paid for it With how overpriced Claude's API is, I highly doubt they are losing money Especially since DeepSeek is somehow making money on their ridiculously cheap API

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Selafin_Dulamond@reddit

Agree. Also they want to push the BS narrative of AI as a global threats.

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BumblebeeParty6389@reddit

So basically Chinese companies paid Anthropic $ per token to generate training material and Anthropic says they are stealing and need to answer for it. But Anthropic scraped TBs of training material from internet for free and it's not stealing and nothing happens. Nice

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Murgatroyd314@reddit

If it’s just about countering the narrative, why are they describing it as an “attack”, and saying that the accounts involved were “fraudulent”?

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Eyelbee@reddit

Because it's not and OP made it up from his ass

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Old-School8916@reddit

the "attack" lang is coded to get the US gov back in their graces to make it a geopolitical issue.

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Far-Association2923@reddit

Is this about who's skynet will be king when AI rules us all?

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YetiTrix@reddit

Ignorance

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ManufacturerWeird161@reddit

My team trained a small model on GPT-4 outputs via the API last year; it's standard practice, and everyone paying for tokens is a customer, not a thief. This feels more like a geopolitical move to control the narrative on AI supremacy.

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badabummbadabing@reddit

Nah, it's lobbying to create a regulatory moat against Chinese models.

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ManufacturerWeird161@reddit

Exactly. A regulatory moat is the real endgame, not protecting IP.

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Ebi_Tendon@reddit

Well, they trained on a subsidized account, or even maybe a free account.

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Technical-Earth-3254@reddit

Ofc they want to discredit everything the chinese researchers do. All the AI companies burn money like it's nothing. If one of those investors would ever understand that, they would run out of money in no time. So they are using all those accusations to stay on top of everything. And btw, didn't Anthropic also ban xAI from using their API or sth? So it's clearly not just a problem between the US and CHN companies, it's just how this space works.

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mumBa_@reddit

Leapfrogging happens through innovation WITH distillation.

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LagOps91@reddit

i'm quite sure the frontier labs are all distilling from each other as well. especially from claude since it's great at coding. they can cry all they want, especially when it comes to "innovation". go release some papers and we can talk about innovation!

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LevianMcBirdo@reddit

I am not even sure that it is illegal. Just because you go against their terms and conditions, doesn't mean that anything fraudulent is happening. The user owns the output. If the providers would own that, it would make using their output worthless.

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GenerativeFart@reddit

What many people don’t realise is that Anthropic is probably playing the most narrative games out of all the big AI companies. Everytime a model is released that competes with their frontier models there is suddenly a news story on how their model “tried to break out”, “actually did not want to be turned off” or “has capabilities that would be too dangerous to let loose on the public” (OpenAI loves this last one too).

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Maximum-Bus-2660@reddit

Its a company of grifters

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locomotive-1@reddit

100%

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KissYourImoutoNOW@reddit

Chinese continuing to make people's lives better while americans try their best to put them down and paint them as monsters and thieves. Perfect microcosm of the world really

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bugra_sa@reddit

There’s probably truth in this. Narrative control is part of competition now. Technical claims, policy framing, and market positioning are all happening at the same time.

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stablelift@reddit

I mean if your model can be black boxed and cloned in about 1 million requests, there's clearly not much of a moat here, and no real innovation

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Optimal-Boat2695@reddit

Innovation isn't a binary zero to one leap, most innovation is marginal/incremental and happens through making existing things slightly better. "Distillation is not innovation" is cope that only works if you assume people are incapable of doing both.

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gourdo@reddit

I dunno about all that. All I know is that if Chinese model A is 10% worse than whatever the latest Anthropic model it distilled itself from at 10% the cost, Anthropic is going to be in a world of hurt.

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ReasonablePossum_@reddit

"No innovation". Coming from a fanboy of labs that instead of papers, release hyped marketing brochures and fearmongering failed training runs lol

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Blues520@reddit

People forget that China is the manufacturing capital of the world. Of course they innovate to some degree too, but their strength has always been distilling products at scale and then selling them for a lower cost. They did this with clothes, electronics, vehicles and now AI. This is like Tesla complaining that Chinese companies copied their designs while BYD and co eat the EV market.

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sb5550@reddit

If it is legal for Anthropic to train on the literatures they purchased, what is the problem for chinese to train on the tokens they paid?

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RecordingLanky9135@reddit

You can do distillation and train your own model but it violates user agreement and will be banned even for an American.

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tokyoagi@reddit

Well, distillation is one way to understand the innovations.

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rulerofthehell@reddit

Not only that, the point which most people are not mentioning here is that this means that Anthropic does spy on user data, this is why local models are essential for privacy

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shoeshineboy_99@reddit

Pot calling the kettle black. Thief lecturing the police. All thieves are brothers.

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Deciheximal144@reddit

Anthropic does care, because if they can make a model **nearly as good** from distillation, then they'll make less money because they're being undercut.

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QuotableMorceau@reddit

the panic of closed model companies is palpable, not for the close performance open weight models achieve, but for the cost efficiency such locally ran models indicate: the narrative of needing billion dollar data centers to run LLM is a pure lie.

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