This idea that Deepseek needed to distil their way to success is nonsense. Its a great narrative for OpenAI and Anthropic to spread because Americans have been brainwashed for two decades into dealing with their own inadequacies by blaming things on scary asians stealing things.
In reality China is outworking and lapping most American companies. They produce 10 EEs to every 1 America produces. They are simply harder workers.
The West is cooked because we're too lazy to work hard and we'd rather make up stories about boogeyman who are stealing from us. The only thing we're good at now is killing people who economically challenge us.
Them provably distilling after being accused of distilling strongly indicates that... that's what they do. To spin a story of them not doing that (because why would they, with their superior talent and all) doesn't seem very reality conform.
The models are impressive enough as is (considering resource constraints and difference in CapEx) despite being heavily distilled from western frontier models. No need to pretend that they're not.
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48966016
[2]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
I think the more reasonable explanation is this is totally made up. Notice how they use examples concerning "cyber and bio" notice how the examples are politically loaded subjects that are hyper relevant to proposed AI dangers and why we need to protect western AI companies with anti-competitive regulations?
Oh no!!! The scary asians are distilling our models, but they only want the scary things!!! They want to hurt you!! We better stop the scary asians!!!
You need to up your media literacy.
Based on what? None of the accused companies have ever denied Anthropic's accusations. And here you are confidently claiming it all to be made it. How much of a reputational hit to one's honesty do you think it carries to completely fabricate someone doing something, when they can just publicly disagree and disprove you? First thing DeepSeek, Moonshot, etc. would do if they hadn't would be to make a press statement calling out Anthropic for their lies.
DeepSeek routing to Fable was corroborated by many independent sources... since... everyone was able to just try it out and see it for themselves.
> Oh no!!! The scary asians are distilling our models, but they only want the scary things!!!
The straw man you're mocking doesn't exist. Non-Chinese labs are also distilling frontier models of their competitors. Elon testified in court that Grok was trained on ChatGPT outputs. And why would they not? It produces objectively better models.
Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
You need better media literacy.
You cant just make up a reality where none of these companies have denied distillation.
The scary asians are going to get you, watch out! Your government is going to eventually tell you that we need kill a bunch of them too because they're so scary. Probably soonish. You're going to fall for it because you believe anything you're told.
These lies are then further supported publicly my western media, random people on twitter, western governments, etc., all to paint China as an evil force that must be united against. Again, in your words "Your government is going to eventually tell you that we need kill a bunch of them too because they're so scary."
And you have dozens of independent parties pushing that same lie to that end and for that purpose? Sure, that's what the New York Times and CNBC must deeply want too. When CNBC writes that they've reached out for comments to the accused companies, but received no responses, they must be lying as well?
It shouldn't be hard for you to demonstrate DeepSeek denying it. Please, go ahead, link to a statement. China's foreign ministry has denied Chinese labs distilling, and, in the same statement accused US labs of distilling from Chinese models. Now that's a very trustworthy claim.
I call it a conspiracy theory because it's a conspiracy theory. Some conspiracies are true, but this one is not. Distilling is both trivially simple and produces objectively better models. Plenty of evidence points to that practice. But in your mind the labs in China are just morally too upstanding in engage in such lowly tactics to create better models, despite the evidence. And it's convenient that the evidence can be explained away by claiming it to be a psyop to paint Chinese as evil.
Multi-turn conversations have much more entropy than one-shot responses, making it more useful to do synchronous distillation.