Comment by phi0
17 hours ago
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.
Despite being "corroborated by independent sources," it was impossible - because deepseek has a higher TPS, can return logits and reveals thinking. Distillation happens asynchronously.
Yeah, I'd expect every lab to use the resources at their disposal to get ahead. Everyone's distilling everyone else, there's nothing wrong with it.
When did I say everything is a grand conspiracy? This whole thing where centrists normies just call anyone who believes something outside their center comfort zone a conspiracy theorist is mega obnoxious.
You need better media literacy.
You cant just make up a reality where none of these companies have denied distillation.
The scary asians are going to get you, watch out! Your government is going to eventually tell you that we need kill a bunch of them too because they're so scary. Probably soonish. You're going to fall for it because you believe anything you're told.
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