thats only because kimi 2.5 was trained using data stolen from claude. it wouldnt exist without riding claudes coat tails. none of the so called 'open source' models would
If distillation wasn't a thing, they would certainly exist, they would have trained them from scratch or via a decent base models to remain economically viable.
What's for sure is that Claude wouldn't exist if it wasn't for data stolen from millions of creators. As they found themselves admittedly guilty of.
At not a single point in history did Llama ever achieve comparable real-world performance to frontier models. I was around. At best they were earlier at benchmaxxing than the others.