Comment by lifeisloving
17 hours ago
Who said they need to distill anything? Deepseek is the most popular chinese model getting trillions of input tokens a day that have no ZDR availability. They specifically tell you that part of the deal is that they get your data to use however they want (atleast they're honest).
This idea that Deepseek needed to distil their way to success is nonsense. Its a great narrative for OpenAI and Anthropic to spread because Americans have been brainwashed for two decades into dealing with their own inadequacies by blaming things on scary asians stealing things.
In reality China is outworking and lapping most American companies. They produce 10 EEs to every 1 America produces. They are simply harder workers.
The West is cooked because we're too lazy to work hard and we'd rather make up stories about boogeyman who are stealing from us. The only thing we're good at now is killing people who economically challenge us.
DeepSeek's API used to (does still?) route your requests directly to Claude Fable[1]. Those were provably Claude Fable's responses being returned by the DeepSeek API. This was months after Anthropic accused them of distillation of Claude at scale[2].
Them provably distilling after being accused of distilling strongly indicates that... that's what they do. To spin a story of them not doing that (because why would they, with their superior talent and all) doesn't seem very reality conform.
The models are impressive enough as is (considering resource constraints and difference in CapEx) despite being heavily distilled from western frontier models. No need to pretend that they're not.
[1]: https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
You really cited a tech politics person, and Anthropic... The poltical AI people are the exact type of cope distributors I complained about above.
I think the more reasonable explanation is this is totally made up. Notice how they use examples concerning "cyber and bio" notice how the examples are politically loaded subjects that are hyper relevant to proposed AI dangers and why we need to protect western AI companies with anti-competitive regulations?
Oh no!!! The scary asians are distilling our models, but they only want the scary things!!! They want to hurt you!! We better stop the scary asians!!!
You need to up your media literacy.
> I think the more reasonable explanation is this is totally made up.
Based on what? None of the accused companies have ever denied Anthropic's accusations. And here you are confidently claiming it all to be made it. How much of a reputational hit to one's honesty do you think it carries to completely fabricate someone doing something, when they can just publicly disagree and disprove you? First thing DeepSeek, Moonshot, etc. would do if they hadn't would be to make a press statement calling out Anthropic for their lies.
DeepSeek routing to Fable was corroborated by many independent sources... since... everyone was able to just try it out and see it for themselves.
> Oh no!!! The scary asians are distilling our models, but they only want the scary things!!!
The straw man you're mocking doesn't exist. Non-Chinese labs are also distilling frontier models of their competitors. Elon testified in court that Grok was trained on ChatGPT outputs. And why would they not? It produces objectively better models.
Not everything is a grand conspiracy.
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Deepseek Harness lets you opt out of your data being used for training. Perhaps they're lying, but if so I'd have expected someone to point it out and win internet points for exposing false promises. I leave mine opted in since I don't have PII to worry about.