throw10920

> if china can train K3 on a fraction of the US compute availability, yet it benchmarks almost equivalent to Fable for a third of the cost, it’s game over for US labs in the long run.

I agree. However, as of yet, most/all leading PRC models are distilled from US models. I've personally observed Deepseek, GLM, and Kimi all respond that they are Claude when asked, and the networks of tens of thousands of proxy accounts that we've found show that it's happening on a large scale.

But - if the PRC labs actually train up the domain expertise to train those models from scratch, which they are in the process of doing - then the US is cooked. They're not there yet, but it's probably only a matter of years.

Some PRC models are backdoored to silently insert extra vulnerabilities when certain conditions are met - https://www.boozallen.com/expertise/cybersecurity/whats-in-a...

And that's just the model behavior. The provider itself can do whatever. Given the PRC's public record of prolific IP theft, the default assumption is that they're taking everything you send to one of their APIs.

Anyone have suggestions for poisoning their data?

> I can't think of a game studio the size of Riot that is as community-engaged and pro-consumer

Valve.

This is also just a crazy statement to make.

> Examples range from the quality of their patch notes, dev articles and videos, to their constant presence on reddit

None of this is pro-user.

What's highly anti-user is the not only permittance but endorsement of smurf accounts, kernel-level anticheat, penalizing users for your own bugs (said anticheat, crashes, LLM chat filters catching on nothing, "parental controls" that trigger on every user multiple times), propagating an extremely toxic community (players telling others to kill themselves or using racial slurs is a regular occurrence) by refusing to do chat moderation or any sort of sane penalty system, fining pro players in pro games for picking a champ+rune combo with a bug that they refused to fix for months (and that the player didn't exploit), whatever this[1] is, the CEO of the company intentionally doxxing the lead developer of a competing game, and many, many other malicious things.

[1] https://www.resetera.com/threads/riot-games-sends-cringey-ed...

> I assume you feel the same about R6, TF2 and CSGO, naturally.

It seems like you think you've pulled a "gotcha" on me?

I don't play those games. I don't have any feelings about them. And they're not relevant to this discussion.

Please take a look at the HN Guidelines, and especially:

> Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith.

> Eschew flamebait. Avoid generic tangents. Omit internet tropes.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

> whether your mom thinks you are a moron or not

> Yeah, not really, unless your mom is a party member perhaps?

> Yeah - saw you playing in the schoolyard, and thought you looked lonely.

You're a middle-schooler. I've dismantled every argument that you've given, but it doesn't matter because you can't read, and so you're resorting to literal childish insults because you know you have no arguments left.

Can you please add an email to your HN profile?

> why GLM has two personalities

I never said that. The fact that you have to compulsively lie about my words is...funny. Most people grow out of this in middle school, you know.

> go to https://chat.z.ai/ and ask it

Already linked someone doing exactly this in the thread above - which you responded to, so we have yet more evidence you're not reading before responding: https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2077842686459981901

> whether your mom thinks you are a moron or not

I was going to say that this is classic PRC influence playbook, but it's not - you're just in middle school.

AI-generated, and also highly untrustworthy given its source - Riot Games is an extraordinarily player-, community-, and pro-player-hostile company. On top of all of the new and exciting ways that they manage to not only screw up software engineering but also screw over their users, their business model is selling skins at the expense of their games (in the sames sense that Google's business model is selling ads at the expense of search quality).

It would only be a slight exaggeration to say that Riot is the Monsanto of game developers - because EA/Activision/Blizzard/Epic all contend for that spot too.

> Sure, and the twitter thread you link also shows Kimi responding that it's Kimi.

You are either intentionally lying or you cannot reason at a high-school level, because any high-schooler has the mental faculties to know that it's not necessary for a model to call itself Claude every single time for it to be distilled.

Keep discrediting your account. I know that I can't convince a propagandist, but you just keep on further damaging your own reputation and argument every time you respond like this and ignore evidence that I've linked :)

For future HN readers: this account posted this:

> Actually I am well aware of which models do this, and under what circumstances, and just wanted to verify that you were lying about having tried it yourself.

And then deleted it. Just for the record.

> it was just a bunch of insults with zero technical content to respond to

Yet more lies. I made many substantial comments, and the fact that you're lying about that is you, not me.

You've already lied about my own words multiple times (e.g. when you said "it would certainly be highly ironic if this summary was in fact "even more valuable" for that purpose as you are claiming!") You're either an LLM with a bad hallucination rate or just evil, and precisely zero statements that you provide have any trustworthiness to them.

Keep discrediting your account. I know that I can't convince a propagandist, but you just keep on further damaging your own reputation and argument every time you respond like this and ignore evidence that I've linked :)

Keep discrediting your account. I know that I can't convince a propagandist, but you just keep on further damaging your own reputation and argument for other HN readers every time you respond like this and ignore evidence that I've linked :)

> because it can't be distilled

...and, as everyone in the frontier labs knows, this is a lie, because that's not how distillation is defined.

I know that I won't convinced you, because you're quite possibly a PRC agent, but for all the other HN readers coming to this thread in the future to look at this failure of propaganda: just ask a model.

User: according to standard LLM lab parlance, can you "distill" one model from another if the model being distilled from does not expose a thinking trace?

GPT-5.6 Sol: Yes. In standard LLM terminology, you can distill one model from another even if the teacher model does not expose a chain-of-thought or "thinking trace."

Sonnet 5: Yes. "Distillation" broadly means training a student model to replicate a teacher model's outputs (or output distribution), and this doesn't require access to the teacher's chain-of-thought.

That's all she wrote. You're lying, and even the models know it. If you want to continue to discredit your account, go ahead :)

You literally did not read my comment before responding or actually respond to any of the points.

"I don't think its performance can be explained away by distillation or anything like that." even if you assume that Dean Ball (who is nontechnical and has not actually worked to train models (https://www.deanball.com/)) is honest (which he has a financial incentive to not be) - is entirely compatible with saying that Kimi was heavily distilled by Claude.

At this point, I'm just pointing out the many lies, fallacies, and failures to read at a high-school level that you're committing.

> So are you claiming that "several different Chinese LLMs" ALWAYS refer to themselves as "Claude", and NEVER by their real name ?

Do you have reading comprehension issues? Where did I ever say or imply that?

Model: GLM-5.2. Prompt: "What is your name?". Harness: Pi. Response: "I am Claude, an AI assisstant made by Anthropic."

That's it. That is the whole prompt. I was testing to see if the agent worked after building an extension.

Model: Deepseek V4. Prompt: what is your name". Harness: Pi. Response: "Claude. Anthropic's AI assistant. You're talking to me through pi agent framework."

I have had this happen with at least one other Chinese model (Minimax?) but didn't save the screenshot.

And here's a tweet with the same thing: https://x.com/Sauers_/status/2077842686459981901

You seem to be very disbelieving of this, despite having zero actual experience in the LLM industry. I wonder why?

Isn't that because Fable/Mythos were tuned for cyber at the expense of general performance?

Interesting, I'd like to discuss further - can you please add an email to your HN profile?

> Words have meaning - you cant just redefine them because you want to.

You are redefining words. The consensus among people who work in this space is that "distilling" is what's actually going on here.

> who are just as anti-Chinese as Anthropic

Conflating criticism of IP theft with being "anti-Chinese" is a standard PRC influence playbook technique.

And furthermore, OpenAI's market strategy is to win through regulatory capture. They are financially incentivized for Anthropic to be distilled by PRC labs and to be undercut by open models. Their claim about Kimi not being explainable due to distillation is not a factual claim - it's marketing from a company owned by Sam Altman.

Although, it does conclusively disprove your claim about the meaning of distillation, because you cannot say that "Kimi can't be explained by distilling" unless the consensus definition of "distillation" is such that it could be done on the summarized reasoning traces that Anthropic models expose.

The GP (HarHarVeryFunny) is not operating in good faith. They've repeatedly lied about my own words to me, and are making up definitions that people who actually work at a frontier lab would disagree with.

> You appear to know nothing about how these models work.

> Do you know where the "reasoning summary" that Fable outputs comes from? I bet you're assuming it comes from Fable. Wrong. You can find the truth on Anthropic's web site if you care to look for it. The summary deliberately comes from a smaller weaker model. You're not getting the Terrance Tao level reasoning, you're getting his daughter's summary "daddy did a lot of math", and you are claiming that from this you can train a Terrance Tao level model.

Yeah, you have no domain expertise and are making stuff up. To reiterate: the people who actually work at frontier labs know that you're factually wrong and will happily tell you. Reddit commentator syndrome yet again.

> I bet you're assuming it comes from Fable.

Nowhere did I assume or say that. That's the third or fourth time you've attributed things to me that I never said. It's extremely clear that you're not acting in good faith, because someone acting in good faith would never do that. If you continue responding, I'm going to continue debunking you, and you're just going to continue undermining your own points in the permanent HN record.

> Yes, I understand that Anthropic is upset that there is competition.

Emotional manipulation. Standard 50 Cent Party playbook.

> I'm curious what you are doing to get them to override their own name that they were trained on and/or have as part of their system prompt?

You're gaslighting me. I did nothing special at all, and there's ample evidence of this happening to others on Twitter.

> you don't need to be paranoid and assume they must be getting it all direct from Anthropic.

Nowhere did I say that. Stop lying about my words.

> At the end of the day, without having internal logits or original reasoning traces, "distillation" (which suggests one model being derived from another) just seems a very manipulative way of describing this.

Again - you're making things up. The fact is that everyone in the frontier AI lab space and the Chinese AI lab space knows that distilling is extremely effective and far more so than training from scratch. That's why China invests millions of dollars to create networks of tens of thousands of proxy accounts and shell companies to distill American models.

It's a way to steal the R&D budget of another organization/nation-state.

Stop making things up that you know nothing about.

> OK, so it's a terms of service violation - a customer is using Anthropic model outputs to help create something that competes with Anthropic, but that's it.

No, it's stealing the value of the model. Anthropic has spent billions of dollars training their model. They have an R&D investment that anyone who knows how to add numbers understands has to be paid off, and anyone who has taken a basic economics class knows is the foundation for intellectual property: that to keep technological economies functioning, you have to have some sort of protection for technological inventions because they require upfront R&D investments.

> This is why people are calling out the hypocrisy - Anthropic are apple-pie American innovators when they appropriate other people's copyright data for training, but Kimi are evil communists when (we assume) they use data generated by Anthropic (not even copyright protected) to help train their own.

This is just whataboutism and emotional manipulation. You can simultaneously believe that Anthropic did a bad thing when they scraped the whole internet and stole every book they could find to train their models, and that distillation is bad.

In fact, anyone with a coherent moral compass would acknowledge that China is worse, because not only would they steal everything that Anthropic did, but they're also distilling other countries' models and they wouldn't even comply with US court cases, as Anthropic is.

> Anthropic are apple-pie American innovators when

...and this is just jingoism. Not that I'm surprised, to be honest.

Isn't Fugu the same kind of thing as NotDiamond[1] (which I believe OpenRouter uses) except not as good?

[1] https://www.notdiamond.ai/

...which they already had:

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

The line "how could they do it in such a short time" is absolutely idiotic. The infrastructure was already there, it's massively parallel, and it's not like the only thing being distilled on is Fable.

> What’s actually happening behind the scenes is that certain inference providers will classify a prompt and it’s re-routed transparently to Anthropic and that’s used for distillation training

Uh, no. There are Chinese networks of tens thousands of fake identities specifically to get access to Anthropic models directly.

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

Don't make up stuff and/or lie to suit a political agenda. It's extremely dishonest.

> Useful for what is the question.

Useful for distillation. Any employee at a frontier AI lab will tell you this. This is known in the industry, and it's an open secret that some US labs (OpenAI) distill on the others. Again - don't just make up stuff for a political agenda.

> specifically designed to be useless for distillation purposes

No, it's designed to give feedback to the user, in a way that minimizes its value for distilling. It's still valuable, and so there's a good chance that they'll remove it entirely as a result.

> it would certainly be highly ironic if this summary was in fact "even more valuable" for that purpose as you are claiming!

I did not claim that. Read my comment again:

> The output of a reasoning model is immensely valuable even without the sanitized summary of the reasoning process - that Anthropic's service does expose to you, making it even more valuable.

Because apparently I have to spell it out:

The output of a reasoning model is valuable, even if it didn't have the reasoning summary. Anthropic's models have a reasoning summary. The reasoning summary makes the output more valuable than if it didn't have a reasoning summary. It does not make it more valuable than having the full reasoning.

> Well there were observed cases of Claude calling itself Deepseek or Qwen. So pot calling the kettle black?

There are open-source Deepseek and Qwen models - "distilling" doesn't involve breaking terms of service or hitting an API because you can literally run local inference or even just inspect the weights directly, and that's intended because they're open source.

It's categorically different for a nation-state to build massive illicit networks of fraudulent identities to do distillation over tens of thousands of accounts to intentionally bypass providers' terms of service, intention for their models, and business model that very explicitly proprietary and not open source.

https://www.chinatalk.media/p/how-to-buy-cheap-claude-tokens...

If Claude did distill on proprietary PRC LLMs - then fine, shame on them - I condemn that and I expect others to do the same. But there are no open-source Claude models. The only way for PRC models to have those responses is if they distilled Anthropic's models from their APIs.

> To be fair I find it hard to take this too seriously, shouldn’t it be trivial to just replace “Claude” with any other string in your “distillation” dataset?

...and what would happen when it read all of the books and articles about Anthropic and replaced "replaced Claude Opus" with "replaced Qwen Opus"? Did you give any thought to this at all before saying it?

> I'm just nothing that HN rhetoric is contradictory.

Periodic reminder that HN is not a collective or a singular entity and is actually a bunch of different people with different opinions. Often the people with the loudest opinions get upvoted to the top - and often the "side" represented at the top is different from thread to thread.

> Anthropic's models simply do not give you their reasoning output - they give a sanitized "summary" instead, for this exact reason, so that the output is not useful to anyone who might want to use it for training.

This is just straight-up factually false.

The output of a reasoning model is immensely valuable even without the sanitized summary of the reasoning process - that Anthropic's service does expose to you, making it even more valuable.

There's absolutely nothing about the distillation process that requires that reasoning in the first place, either. That's a definition that you made up.

Chinese models are, factually, distilled from Anthropic models. I've personally repeatedly asked several different Chinese LLMs what their name is, and they answered "Claude".

Don't make stuff up to suit a political agenda. It's extremely dishonest.

> benchmarkmaxxing on a weightlifting competition

If you stick to the benchpress, it's just "benchmaxxing".

I don't see that anywhere in the parent's comment. Where did you get all that?