Comment by c0rruptbytes
1 day ago
LLMs could’ve been developed a lot slower without capsizing the entire supply chain and been seen a lot more positively, China is building a lot of good AI with a minuscule of the compute power and it’s fine
there was never a need to rush other than for capitals self interest to control
if frontier labs wanna pace the frontier, they should be honest and return the compute back to the people
China is building good AI by distilling American models. I think that's a great thing, but Chinese progress is currently dependent on American progress, because China lacks the compute to train the largest models (as stated by DeepSeek's founder[1])
[1] https://sumsec.me/2026/liang-wenfeng-investor-meeting-transc...
i knew about the compute already (he was very public about i believe huawei under delivering the amount of chips he requested), but nowhere in that transcript does he say he's dependent on US progress for his own progress or he's distilling the US to make progress
i don't really think distilling is even that fundamental anymore (nor was the evidence ever that strong - https://msukhareva.substack.com/p/is-kimi-k3-really-distille...), the game is all RL now, and you don't need american progress for that at all (just compute and data, and the data brokers will sell to anyone no problem)
i do think there are black market proxies from china to the US trying to sell "claude" and "deepseek" access mixed together, and i do think that prompt distribution is probably going to be very nice datasets