> As for people asking where is the evidence for half of this, you will never have public evidence for most of this, but deduce what the partly hidden parts reveal about the whole and it is fairly obvious, especially if you look at the past behaviors of the governments and other actors.
To help you further understand, the Chinese labs will never admit they were distilling until they are better than US labs with their own non-distilling process or some sort of espionage-like public reveal shows it. So you need to look at secondary indicators. Much like how the chinese government lies about their economic stats so 3rd parties use secondary indicators to figure it out.
Nathan Lambert has made this distinction explicitly: he thinks Chinese labs likely innovate heavily on distillation, while saying he wouldn't call it a crucial factor in their post-training capabilities, in part because the RL work still has to be done by the lab itself -- just like what I said above.
https://www.interconnects.ai/p/how-much-does-distillation-re...