Distillation from closed frontier models, not independent invention, is what let Chinese labs close the distance to the frontier.
Watched: 3 source(s) hold a position on this claim, fewer than the four that make it rankable. The disagreement is recorded; the evidence behind it is still thin.
2 source(s) assert this claim, 1 deny it.
Who asserts it
- Our position on open-weights models
dario-amodei-position-open-weights-models-2026-07-27 - Sam Altman: OpenAI Reddit AMA — Full Thread (January 2025)
sam-altman-wrong-side-of-history-2025-02
- **We should not sell powerful chips or chipmaking equipment to China**, and we should crack down on the rampant [smuggling](https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/three-charged-conspiring-unlawfully-divert-cutting-edge-us-artificial-intelligence)[^3] and workarounds used to obtain access to such chips. China has limited domestic production capacity, and therefore, due to the [scaling laws](https://arxiv.org/abs/2001.08361), cannot build more powerful models than the US without US chips.
--- #109 | u/Singularity-42 --- My personal opinion is that it's not there so other companies cannot RL on the CoT output. This would have been immensely useful for the DeepSeeks of the world.
Who denies it
- China, Open Source & AI Competitiveness | Andrew Ng
andrew-ng-open-source-ai-competitiveness-2026-07-29
10:19 So it is clear that we have great technical innovations in America and China has great technical innovations. In fact many of the US frontier labs are actively reading a lot of the open research that the Chinese labs published. I mean you have to be dumb not to. So American labs are definitely benefiting from tons of Chinese research lab innovations. I think the concept that distillation is a major factor has been overstated, vastly overstated. There's a question of what the world should consider fair.
0:00 If an adversary of the United States wanted to slow us down, I think they couldn't wish for almost anything better than these silly moratoriums on building our data centers. I've been alarmed at the amount of lobbying that a handful of businesses have been doing, saying that open models are dangerous. I think that's false. I think the concept that distillation is a [music] major factor has been overstated.
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