I'm also grateful to the Chinese labs for providing workarounds for the walled gardens that the US based AI companies are attempting to create.
Does anyone know if there are any distillation datasets available? I'd love to see these distributed on BitTorrent. I think it's critical that AI be democratized and not isolated in the hands of a few private companies.
I've been running Qwen 3.8 27b (an opus 4.6 tier model), locally on a 5090 for just over two weeks @ 170 tokens/s. That's a frontier model from 9 months ago running on consumer hardware. Who knows where distillation and pruning gets us in another year.
My immediate midwit take is: doesn't matter if it helps Anthropic/OpenAI if it helps DeepSeek more, relatively. Making open-weights models even cheaper and easier to run expands that "market" and increases competitive pressure on the Big Two, who still have to charge money.
There are 1000 Chinese labs. They are involuting, they cannot coordinate and the state won't let them coordinate because the state wants domination, not actual profits for anybody. So the market forces are allowed to dominate.
Because of the basic huge recession going on in China, you can't actually make money in China doing China things. So they gotta gird up their export stuff and try to export. That entails strong relations with American companies, American PR, English stuff, etc.
If you want an essay about this from a VC, read this one
What a strange way to put it. Market forces are a good thing in a market economy. Only someone who secretly wants or hopes for monopolies would you say something to the contrary (a VC).
They want the Western labs to keep digging themselves into a hole? You can do so by egging on the true believers on your side to egg on the labs on the other side.
> If you read the news headlines these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Western labs are getting spawn-camped by Chinese labs en masse.
Watch any interview with the Chinese AI leaders and compare it to the unending doomer word salads from America's mightiest paper billionaires. We're losing because we have a loser late stage capitalist scarcity mindset. They're winning because they're sharing notes and one-upping each other just like we used to until 2015 or so. They have a healthy ecosystem of competing small AI startups. We have two bloated unprofitable pigs both striving to be too big to fail. My money's on China for the immediate future.
As far as I can tell, neither of the frontier US labs have referred to distillation as "stealing", but someone please provide a link if I'm wrong.
They do claim that it violates their ToS, which we can assume is simply correct, since they get to put whatever they want in their ToS.
Given all that, I don't know what the fuss is. Are they supposed to not use the advances that were openly published by Chinese labs? The entire industry is built on a discovery made at Google, which was published openly. Should Chinese labs therefore not use transformers? Should US labs not try to prevent distillation of their models?
I don’t think there is fuss, just the author sharing the information and mentioning how they find it a bit ironic that US labs expenses can be reduced drastically thanks to the Chinese companies they continuously frame as adversaries
The first sentence is: "If you read the news headlines these days, you would be forgiven for thinking that the Western labs are getting spawn-camped by Chinese labs en masse."
Since I have no idea what "spawn-camped" means I gave up reading the rest.
> if you've been online a little bit you'd know this expression
I've been online since circa 1995 (earlier if you count BBSs), and I can't say I did. It's possible to infer its meaning but assuming everyone is on the same circles as one is, is silly.
If you tend to stop reading every time you encounter something you don't understand, I can't imagine you learn very much
"spawn-camping" is the process of taking out your enemies at the point they spawn (or appear) in a game without giving them a chance to regroup. In this case I think the writer is saying that the news implies that western models are getting distilled on release. Not the perfect analogy but it gives some color.
In first-person shooters, when you die you regenerate (“respawn”) somewhere on the map. If those regeneration points are know to opposing players, they can wait next to them, and kill you again the moment you respawn.
The premise in this article is: Western companies do a ton of expensive work building new models, meanwhile the Chinese companies just wait for a Western release and then they immediately grab and distill it and announce it as their own model. That’s the spawn-camp.
Does anyone know if there are any distillation datasets available? I'd love to see these distributed on BitTorrent. I think it's critical that AI be democratized and not isolated in the hands of a few private companies.
If local LLMs get "good" enough, people will soon paying for subscriptions to ChatGPT and Claude, which hurts their revenue.
Think you missed a word there.
Any ideas?
Because of the basic huge recession going on in China, you can't actually make money in China doing China things. So they gotta gird up their export stuff and try to export. That entails strong relations with American companies, American PR, English stuff, etc.
If you want an essay about this from a VC, read this one
https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex...
Ah brings back Halo 2 memories
They do claim that it violates their ToS, which we can assume is simply correct, since they get to put whatever they want in their ToS.
Given all that, I don't know what the fuss is. Are they supposed to not use the advances that were openly published by Chinese labs? The entire industry is built on a discovery made at Google, which was published openly. Should Chinese labs therefore not use transformers? Should US labs not try to prevent distillation of their models?
Edit: Apt domain.
Since I have no idea what "spawn-camped" means I gave up reading the rest.
It's not that niche, if you've been online a little bit you'd know this expression.
I've been online since circa 1995 (earlier if you count BBSs), and I can't say I did. It's possible to infer its meaning but assuming everyone is on the same circles as one is, is silly.
"spawn-camping" is the process of taking out your enemies at the point they spawn (or appear) in a game without giving them a chance to regroup. In this case I think the writer is saying that the news implies that western models are getting distilled on release. Not the perfect analogy but it gives some color.
The premise in this article is: Western companies do a ton of expensive work building new models, meanwhile the Chinese companies just wait for a Western release and then they immediately grab and distill it and announce it as their own model. That’s the spawn-camp.
In a PvP (player vs player) game, if you kill a player the moment they spawn into the game arena, that's called "spawn-camping".