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Comment by piker | Hacker News Reader

Jensen has a point. I believe these were trained and run on Huawei chips. The Nvidia embargo may backfire on American leadership as necessity gives way to invention.

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Isn't it widely speculated that these are distilled from current frontier models? Distillation is far less compute intensive than primary training. That said, if distillation produces something almost as good for a fraction of the cost, Jensen's point may stand.

You can't really distill a model without access to the internal weights. You could train on chat logs, but that's absolutely not the same thing, it doesn't even come close to comprehensively "extracting" the model's capabilities. And everyone does that in the industry anyway ever since ChatGPT was first released, some versions of Opus even claimed to be DeepSeek if you prompted them in Chinese.

Calling it distillation does however make normies go along with it when they inevitably add all the Chinese labs to the entities list to pad Dario and Sam’s pockets.

actually distillation is without weights - you basically just need a black box teacher model.

Weights are not required for distillation. I'm not sure how you came to that belief. Distillation is training a student model to minimic a teacher model output.

Anthropic, for example, posted a 2026 disclosure (https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...) which singles out DeepSeek's distillation activity. They detected over 16M actions over 24,000 fraudulent accounts. That's just what they detected.

It's too late already, that ship has long sailed. China has the know how in software and hardware. They don't need American tech, they just want it because it's convenient.

These were trained on NVIDIA gpus. It is running inference on Huawei.

The embargo won't backfire, because any delay of China's development was worth it to the US. The situation was never, "China wasn't developing AI chips, now it is", it was always, "China IS developing their own AI chips, let's just slow them down as much as we can."

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