Comment by piker
21 hours ago
It's a mistake to make this such an obvious copy. It will feed the narrative that Chinese entities cannot be trusted by the West. They could have varied it even slightly. It's one thing with hardware because customers don't need to trust suppliers any further than they can throw the box. But these labs seem to be battling for enterprise knowledge work-share. Trust is paramount, and they're already behind on that front. Own goal.
Copying is not frowned upon in the LLM ecosystem. This is its very reason of existence.
How to make an apple pie from scratch with no copying:
Step 1: invent the universe
Funnily enough, you will have to pretty accurately copy the laws of our universe to make an Apple pie. Even small changes will change the properties of atoms, and hence all of chemistry and biology. And there won't be any apples or wheat.
The baker is not asking you to trust them with your entire knowledge base in exchange for an apple pie.
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Perhaps, but "we run the exact same business as Anthropic and OpenAI to the pixel at 0.1% the price" is going to raise eyebrows.
Eyebrows will raise at Anthropic / OpenAI, perhaps. Why are they charging 1000x more for the exact same business?
The 'distillation is theft!' shtick won't last long. In fact, unlike Anthropic/OpenAI, these Chinese labs actually had to pay for that 'stolen' training data.
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GLM 5.2 and Kimi 3 both had huge API pricing jumps (GLM most expensive chinese model, by a lot, then then Kimi 3 a lot higher than that). the cost advantage is rapidly decaying. the oft-cited cost per task makes Kimi look good vs Anthropic but even, or slightly vs OpenAI
Once the OpenAI/Anthropic-driven hype dies down people with decision-making power will be taking a look at the numbers and look at real productivity metrics. And they'll see it makes little sense to pay so much when competition is around and similarly good.
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Why?
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Meh, we should just ignore that kind of propaganda. We copy things too, we use a system to protect IP because copying is such a normal and strong human thing to do.
In fact, when we don't discuss China, most find modern software patents and copyright to be abusive.
Finally, copying UX standards has been done for ages, it gives users a comfortable way to start using a product and instead of fighting that to be unique, some rather embrace it.
It can be jarring using so many different apps if each one tries too hard to be unique.
And this is my two cents, here it makes sense to have a similar interface, it's ultimately an app with chat sessions.
I do agree with the UX idea of familiarity, but copying the exact salutations, etc. just seems egregious.
Why not let the model speak for itself and contribute to an open harness?
Narrative?
Kind of like the sphere Earth narrative.
Pedantic.
> A narrative is a structured account of connected events, experiences, or ideas, commonly referred to as a story
Regardless of intent, it is how you tell your story.
I don't think the comment was intended to be pedantic, but rather to reframe the message as scientific fact.
I think you misunderstood. “Narrative” typically frames something as polemic or open to interpretation, which this is about equally so to the whole “spherical Earth” story.