Poor AI labs... All they hard earned training, done via scraping a lot of people works for free, now being scraped through payed subscriptions...

Here's a site that asks the same questions to 22 models and compares how similar their responses are.

https://typebulb.com/u/lab/you-re-relatively-right/full

According to these results GLM 5.2 is very similar to Google Gemini and Kimi K3 is very similar to Fable 5.

The American frontier labs are not similar to each other.

it was obvious from day 1 this is what happened

the chinese labs haven't been improving at training from scratch, they've been getting better and better at distilling models, so naturally they continue to follow this path

firstly, it shows the vulnerability of exposing a model to users. a highly capable group can quite literally suck the functionality out of your model and take it for themselves, so there's no sandboxing it

secondly, it's actually interesting to know that distillation is so powerful. in the science-fiction scenario of meeting some other form of intelligent life, they might have their own models and this would be a way of siphoning intelligence off of them

One of the replies:

> @MehdiKarech

> I don't remember letting Anthropic or Open Ai scrapping my GitHub, my research gate and all my online writings L O L

https://xcancel.com/MehdiKarech/status/2080000779859939678#m

You wouldn't distill a car.

We have information that Claude distilled billions of copyrighted, and otherwise-created-by-others, materials for the development of their entire business.

If web scraping is legal, so is distilling.

Considering that LLM are created using stolen content or against licensing, it’s only fair to distill and open source them.

In the meantime, reddit is making fun of Opus for "distilling" Qwen:

https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1tqaist/opus_48...

(don't take this too seriously)

I doubt they did any distillation as Hinton defined it (requiring logit access). They most likely ran a bunch of prompts/conversations and captured the results. Those conversations already missed thinking tokens, replaced by some confusing quasi-summaries. Then they took those and ran basic SFT or maybe DPO if they had competing responses. As there is no copyright on the output of AI, I am not sure where is the "covert industrial distillation" part of the problem.