Openai, grok, and Anthropic aren't distilling. Theyre just second class. It's not a big deal, we just shouldn't be lauding them for being second class.
Says who? We know Grok does at the least. They admitted it openly.
Alternative explanation is that the Chinese have far more technical talent than anyone else, along with the infra and capital to build out these models.
My money is on the latter explanation, tbh.