It's a mistake to think only OpenAI and Anthropic are actually spending the big bucks on pretrain, and the others just distill that.
The Chinese models are pretrained on large clusters just like OpenAI ones are. Yes, they use outputs of the frontier models to further improve the final model, but even without those outputs they'd still have very strong models.
It's not like in a world without distillation things would be much different as you claim.
The Chinese models are pretrained on large clusters just like OpenAI ones are. Yes, they use outputs of the frontier models to further improve the final model, but even without those outputs they'd still have very strong models.
It's not like in a world without distillation things would be much different as you claim.