3 ms·

Commenters are overlooking the significance of this information and posting emotional reactions based on perceptions of fairness or feelings of schadenfreude.

Commenters are overlooking the significance of this information and posting emotional reactions based on perceptions of fairness or feelings of schadenfreude. The economic viability of Anthropic and OpenAI rely on their being able to charge more for model access than their R&D and inference costs. If the market price for SOTA model access drops below that level, then these businesses will have to decide whether to continue to lose money or to reduce spending on R&D. Moonshot's papers [1] claim that their training load was primarily from synthetic data and model self-teaching rather than RLHF and therefore keep their costs low. If Moonshot genuinely does not rely on human-led training, they will surpass US closed-source model providers. The United States government considers US supremacy in "AI" as a national security consideration. This announcement is noteworthy because it implies that Moonshot's success is in fact due to distillation. It's in the interest of US frontier labs to place barriers to this if they find themselves in the position of subsidizing rival labs' research. 1. Kimi K2, https://arxiv.org/html/2507.20534v1 https://arxiv.org/html/2507.20534v1

asadotzler 3mo ago
s/announcement/claim You don't get to call Moonshot's a "claim" and this political hack's an "announcement." They're the same thing. Treat them the same. Diction designed to favor one of two equal positions is some weak sauce.
- linkregister 3mo ago
  You're calling someone a political hack, but imposing neutrality on my statement. I don't even necessarily disagree with your assessment of this spokesperson. But you must admit how inconsistent you're being.
amazingamazing 3mo ago
It doesn’t matter. Distillation is impossible to stop. They could release an extension that intercepts requests and in return gives you a discount like Honey and get the same data.
- bhelkey 3mo ago
  > Distillation is impossible to stop Lots of things are impossible or very difficult to stop completely but measures can be taken to reduce their prevalence.
  - amazingamazing 3mo ago
    Sure, but the problem is that it hurts legit people too.
    - bhelkey 3mo ago
      > the problem is that it hurts legit people too. What hurts other people too?
      - amazingamazing 3mo ago
        Measures to stop "distillation", rate limiting, ID verification, etc. If there were such a method that didn't harm legitimate use it would already be in place (and some things are, but they don't really work, hence the OP).
    - warkdarrior 3mo ago
      Nobody cares about "legit people", the only thing that matters is that people we don't like suffer.
      - amazingamazing 3mo ago
        Sad but true
matheusmoreira 3mo ago
> The United States government considers US supremacy in "AI" as a national security consideration. And we foreigners consider US supremacy in AI to be an existential threat. Your "national security" is directly harmful to us. I never thought I'd say this but the chinese are starting to look like a beacon of hope for the rest of us.
- some_random 3mo ago
  If the Chinese look like a beacon of hope you then you really should be looking closer.
  - matheusmoreira 3mo ago
    Look closer at what? USA consistently proves itself to be a terrible ally.
  - bigyabai 3mo ago
    Explain it, then. Don't just wimp-out with trite allusions to nothingness. Discredit them.
  - vrganj 3mo ago
    Do you know when the last war China started was? 1979. What about the US? 2026, still ongoing, still fucking up the global economy and threatening food supplies (fertilizer) and fuel reserves, no plan out, no objective reached, no coordination with "allies". When was the last time China threatened Europe or Canada with invasion? Was there ever a time? I honestly don't know. Guess what the US does all the time? Who's models are open and can be used by all? Who's are made by comic book villains with the explicit goal of ruining the job market and capturing the results of all human endeavors for themselves? Of course, China isn't perfect and has a lot of domestic issues. But on the global stage, they sure look better than the alternative.
    - linkregister 3mo ago
      When looking at 2025 and 2026 narrowly, China is a better actor on the world stage. I wonder if Vietnam, Philippines, Republic of Korea, India, and Japan are acting against their own interests by aligning themselves closer to the USA than China. Maybe you can educate their governments and populations.
Bratmon 3mo ago
AI companies do not get to play the "Making an LLM using our data is unethical because the resulting LLM will replace us and hurt our profits" card.
preg_match 3mo ago
I doubt distillation had anything to do with it. They barely had enough time. Can you distill Fable (which involves training!) in literally one week? No!
DubiousPusher 3mo ago
I think this is a really sober comment. There are lots of knock-on effects of this claim, even if it's not true which are consequential. The fact that a spokesperson for the US government is going out of their way to comment is concerning. Strong bee-hive pinata vibes here.
benjiro29 3mo ago
People keep forgetting that over the last 6+ months a lot of increased action has been taken by OpenAI and Anthropic to detect and combat distillation. Several are public known. Combined with how short of a time Fable was around before K3 got released. I do not see how the data Moonshot is supposed to extract in such a short notice, that will enhance the model to such a point. It sounds to me a lot of cope from the US, so they can give this as a reason to ban Kimi models from the market. OpenAI/Anthropic their advantages used to be: * Early growth advantage * Access to a lot of client data to train upon * Access to a lot of hardware to train upon Several of those advantages have been eroded over time. That barrier has been shrinking. The US is not the only spot with a bunch of smart people (ironical seeing how many Chinese work in US R&D). Thing is, even IF they distilled from Fable and got the model so trained up, it means that K3 is a base for future model development. The cat is already out of the bag with how good the model is. When the model gets released on the 27'th, any Chinese company will be able to train their models against K3 openly. We are not in the past anymore, where DeepSeek was a unexpected hit, but where the Frontier models their advantages (compute, data, growth) prevented more Chinese models from growing.
physicsguy 3mo ago
> The United States government considers US supremacy in "AI" as a national security consideration. They thought the same about SSL in the 1990s and the world didn't stop moving elsewhere.

asadotzler 3mo ago

s/announcement/claim You don't get to call Moonshot's a "claim" and this political hack's an "announcement." They're the same thing. Treat them the same. Diction designed to favor one of two equal positions is some weak sauce.

linkregister 3mo ago
You're calling someone a political hack, but imposing neutrality on my statement. I don't even necessarily disagree with your assessment of this spokesperson. But you must admit how inconsistent you're being.

amazingamazing 3mo ago

It doesn’t matter. Distillation is impossible to stop. They could release an extension that intercepts requests and in return gives you a discount like Honey and get the same data.

bhelkey 3mo ago
> Distillation is impossible to stop Lots of things are impossible or very difficult to stop completely but measures can be taken to reduce their prevalence.
- amazingamazing 3mo ago
  Sure, but the problem is that it hurts legit people too.
  - bhelkey 3mo ago
    > the problem is that it hurts legit people too. What hurts other people too?
    - amazingamazing 3mo ago
      Measures to stop "distillation", rate limiting, ID verification, etc. If there were such a method that didn't harm legitimate use it would already be in place (and some things are, but they don't really work, hence the OP).
  - warkdarrior 3mo ago
    Nobody cares about "legit people", the only thing that matters is that people we don't like suffer.
    - amazingamazing 3mo ago
      Sad but true

matheusmoreira 3mo ago

> The United States government considers US supremacy in "AI" as a national security consideration. And we foreigners consider US supremacy in AI to be an existential threat. Your "national security" is directly harmful to us. I never thought I'd say this but the chinese are starting to look like a beacon of hope for the rest of us.

some_random 3mo ago
If the Chinese look like a beacon of hope you then you really should be looking closer.
- matheusmoreira 3mo ago
  Look closer at what? USA consistently proves itself to be a terrible ally.
- bigyabai 3mo ago
  Explain it, then. Don't just wimp-out with trite allusions to nothingness. Discredit them.
- vrganj 3mo ago
  Do you know when the last war China started was? 1979. What about the US? 2026, still ongoing, still fucking up the global economy and threatening food supplies (fertilizer) and fuel reserves, no plan out, no objective reached, no coordination with "allies". When was the last time China threatened Europe or Canada with invasion? Was there ever a time? I honestly don't know. Guess what the US does all the time? Who's models are open and can be used by all? Who's are made by comic book villains with the explicit goal of ruining the job market and capturing the results of all human endeavors for themselves? Of course, China isn't perfect and has a lot of domestic issues. But on the global stage, they sure look better than the alternative.
  - linkregister 3mo ago
    When looking at 2025 and 2026 narrowly, China is a better actor on the world stage. I wonder if Vietnam, Philippines, Republic of Korea, India, and Japan are acting against their own interests by aligning themselves closer to the USA than China. Maybe you can educate their governments and populations.

Bratmon 3mo ago

AI companies do not get to play the "Making an LLM using our data is unethical because the resulting LLM will replace us and hurt our profits" card.

preg_match 3mo ago

I doubt distillation had anything to do with it. They barely had enough time. Can you distill Fable (which involves training!) in literally one week? No!

DubiousPusher 3mo ago

I think this is a really sober comment. There are lots of knock-on effects of this claim, even if it's not true which are consequential. The fact that a spokesperson for the US government is going out of their way to comment is concerning. Strong bee-hive pinata vibes here.

benjiro29 3mo ago

People keep forgetting that over the last 6+ months a lot of increased action has been taken by OpenAI and Anthropic to detect and combat distillation. Several are public known. Combined with how short of a time Fable was around before K3 got released. I do not see how the data Moonshot is supposed to extract in such a short notice, that will enhance the model to such a point. It sounds to me a lot of cope from the US, so they can give this as a reason to ban Kimi models from the market. OpenAI/Anthropic their advantages used to be: * Early growth advantage * Access to a lot of client data to train upon * Access to a lot of hardware to train upon Several of those advantages have been eroded over time. That barrier has been shrinking. The US is not the only spot with a bunch of smart people (ironical seeing how many Chinese work in US R&D). Thing is, even IF they distilled from Fable and got the model so trained up, it means that K3 is a base for future model development. The cat is already out of the bag with how good the model is. When the model gets released on the 27'th, any Chinese company will be able to train their models against K3 openly. We are not in the past anymore, where DeepSeek was a unexpected hit, but where the Frontier models their advantages (compute, data, growth) prevented more Chinese models from growing.

physicsguy 3mo ago

> The United States government considers US supremacy in "AI" as a national security consideration. They thought the same about SSL in the 1990s and the world didn't stop moving elsewhere.