one man's exfiltration is another man's distillation `¯\_(ツ)_/¯`
you could say they're playing by a different set of rules, but distilling from the best available model is the current meta across the industry. only they know what fraction of their post-training data is generated from openai models, but personally i'd bet my ass it's greater than zero because they are clearly competent and in their position it would have been dumb to not do this.
however you want to frame it, they have pushed the field forward -- especially in the realm of open-weight models.
you could say they're playing by a different set of rules, but distilling from the best available model is the current meta across the industry. only they know what fraction of their post-training data is generated from openai models, but personally i'd bet my ass it's greater than zero because they are clearly competent and in their position it would have been dumb to not do this.
however you want to frame it, they have pushed the field forward -- especially in the realm of open-weight models.