Distillation alone is unlikely to explain the rise of Chinese AI models, says Reddit post
pier4r · reddit · 2026-07-21
The post argues that the idea Chinese models are mostly strong because of distillation is overstated.
- The author points to a similarity heatmap across major models and says cross-model resemblance does not prove simple self-distillation.
- They argue that if distillation alone destroyed moats this quickly, every well-resourced lab would already be at the same level.
- The post also raises alternative explanations: broad web scraping, training on AI-generated content, and the growing amount of machine-written text online.
- Overall, it frames model quality as a mix of data, training practices, and the evolving internet corpus—not a single distillation story.
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