Comment by calebkaiser

I am strongly in favor of open models, open source ML more broadly, and am pretty critical of the cynical positions adopted by major US labs vis a vis open models.

But this is an insane characterization. Literally every single researcher and executive at OpenAI and Anthropic would say that "these Chinese labs have a lot of talented people." They hire from them (and vice versa). Tencent's chief AI scientist was poached directly from Deepmind, who poached him from Anthropic, etc etc etc. Do you think there are just zero people from China working at US frontier labs?

And even beyond that, the entire ML ecosystem (including people at OpenAI and Anthropic) get excited about research published by Chinese labs. Deepseek's GRPO paper set the ecosystem on fire for a little while.

The contention from OpenAI and Anthropic around distillation has basically been "Labs that distill from us get to bootstrap their model at a much lower price point". Or, in other words, "If we didn't invest in building the teacher model, it wouldn't be possible for these labs to distill their student model." Which I'm not very sympathetic to, but is a far cry from how you're characterizing it.