Comment by overfeed
16 hours ago
> China aren't offering a cheaper solution. They are subsidizing an existing one
Chinese labs are also pursuing legit frontier-advancing R&D into efficiency and publishing papers in the open, a culture that's in retreat at top American AI labs
Their is plenty of innovation happening on both sides of the Pacific. Again, China publishes open source because they don't have another game they can play. They distill because they don't have the compute to compete. They are great lab, for sure, but the fundamentals are driving their behavior.
The fact that are people that genuinely believe you can train an LLM by using random QAs obtained from another LLM is astonishing. Let alone the fact that it makes absolutely zero financial sense.
At this point this is being repeated so often that completely uninformed users are taking this at face value.
To be fair, Anthropic is participating in the misinformation by dishonestly characterizing what Alibaba is doing with the data as "Distillation" rather than the more probable adding a small fraction to the "fine-tuning" and/or benchmarking data sets.
I understand why - the distillation narrative casts Qwen as a poor copy of a superior model, and cultivates ground for political lobbying for bans. That doesn't make it less dishonest, but I suppose profits trump ethics.
Oh yeah. Strategic disruption technique or not its a breath of fresh air.