The AI Race Just Got Awkward

Why is it a problem that the Chinese labs are just distilling down Anthropic’s models? Aren’t Anthropic’s models not just distilling down other people’s work? Feels like Anthropic crying do as I say not as I do.

I'm also grateful to the Chinese labs for providing workarounds for the walled gardens that the US based AI companies are attempting to create. Does anyone know if there are any distillation datasets available? I'd love to see these distributed on BitTorrent. I think it's critical that AI be democratized and not isolated in the hands of a few private companies.

The best explanation is that it's a goal of the CCP to generally commodotize LLMs, because LLMs will ultimately be a compliment to manufacturing (which China dominates), and you always want to "commodotize your compliments". I think this explains why they are open sourcing broadly. It's not to be nice. It's a strategic play by the Chinese government to help ensure there are many players in this race and not too much power accumulates to American labs (even if American labs benefit in the process)

I'm beyond thankful that Chinese AI models are so good. I desperately want us to cure the myriad of maladies that humans suffer needlessly with on a daily basis. We're going to need more powerful models than we have now if we're gonna do that and the Chinese are providing the competition needed to push this thing as fast as we can. I realize "going as fast as we can" is not the most popular position atm. But I'm far more interested in what good we can do than 10% apocalypse scenarios. I volunteer with a charity for childhood brain cancer and I do not want to see another 4 year old die. I'm willing to risk anything to stop this.

> All this must mean the Western AI companies are now extremely inference-margin positive. > So the Chinese labs have thrown a lifeline to the Western loss-making labs, and I just have no clue as to why. That inference wasn't profitable is a widespread myth. Analysis based on Kimi K3 suggests that OpenAI and Anthropic have margins well north of 95%: https://inferencex.semianalysis.com/run/kimi-k3-on-b200 Over the last months I have seen news that OpenAI made breakthroughs in inference efficiency multiple times. I have no reason to believe that the leading US labs don't have their own optimizations, or that they learned of this particular optimization from DeepSeek.