China is quietly upstaging America with its open models (2025)

Yes but they’re all stolen, using distillation to copy the best models. It’s another example of rampant intellectual theft by China, and should be treated as asymmetric warfare.

And before someone says the Western models are copying others - there’s a difference between fair use of publicly visible information to train a model, which is like how humans learn, and creating tens of thousands of fake accounts and maliciously avoiding detection to violate the terms of a private service, which is more like a cyberattack.