Comment by Alifatisk

Yes, they do distill. But just saying all they do is distill is not correct and actually kind of unfair. These Chinese labs have done lots of research in this field and publish it to the public, some of not majority contribute with open-weight models making a future of local llm possible! Deepseek, Moonshot, Minimax, Z.a, Alibabai (Qwen).

They are not just leeching here, they took this innovation, refined it and improved it further. This is what the Chinese is good at.