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Comment by anon373839 | Hacker News Reader

> China's distillation labs

This notion that Chinese labs are merely distilling frontier models is quite an unwarranted slur. Those labs have published WAY more useful research than US labs on RL techniques, novel model architectures, training pipelines, etc. They have also hit intelligence-per-parameter densities that US labs have yet to attain.

Apart from that, merely training a model on outputs from another model, off policy and without the logits, doesn’t really work that well.

The Chinese labs know how to build frontier level models. GLM-5.2 shows that they no longer even need Nvidia chips to do it.

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It's one of those lies people tell themselves to make themselves feel better. "Oh, they're just copying my stuff."

Chinese labs are basically just telling everyone, out in the open, what they're doing and how to do it, and the answer from American frontier labs is "Well, they couldn't possibly be getting the results they're getting without just distilling our models," and the American labs aren't even trying to do some of the stuff like DS's aggressive caching to get costs down.

I recently watched a video for one of these “Chinese Models” it kept insisting it was Claude when the user asked. Sorry, there’s no “slur” here but legit suspicion.

https://blog.kilo.ai/p/did-claude-opus-48-distill-alibabas

it happens to all models…when the internet is increasingly generated, things happen

These anecdotes where someone gets the model to claim it is X model are meaningless. (Claude also has been known to claim it is Deepseek when asked in Chinese.)

As anyone who's tried to write an AGENTS.md that says "Place an Assisted-by: git trailer that contains the harness you're using:whatever model this is"; such a naive approach often results in a seemingly random model.

But have they? I understand that the Chinese side is illuminated and the American side is dark. I disagree that the Chinese labs have created anything that isn't in an American research lab or production dc. Sure the Chinese have published their findings and not for nothing. But are they novel? Unlikely imo

They are doing ta tremendous amount of novel research where American AI companies have "war rooms" to study their papers and models and American labs publish next to nothing. They have to often do more with less. As an AI researcher, Chinese labs are doing tremendous benefit to science whereas some American companies (and I'm American) seem to think only they are able to do AI research responsibility (I've been working on neural networks for 25+ years). I'm pretty sure Fable sabotaged my research codebase (see the news stories about this).

Whoa, say more about Fable sabotaging your codebase?

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