Chinese labs like Kimi are no longer merely distilling American models; Kimi K3 beat the best closed-source American models on important subsets of tasks, violating the persistent American narrative that China only keeps up through distillation.
Anastasios calls Kimi's open-source beat over closed-source American models a big moment because it breaks the narrative that Chinese labs only succeed by distilling American models. Even if they still use distillation as a sub-step, their performance above American labs shows they are doing something more.
transcript
Anastasios: It was a pretty big moment. And the reason I'd say it was a big moment is because it violates a narrative that has been persistent in the United States, which is that the Chinese are just distilling American models. And that's the only way that they're able to, you know, keep up. When really what happened is that Kimmy actually beat all American models, including Fable, in some subset of tasks. That doesn't mean that they're not distilling. They may still be using distillation as a substep in their training procedure, but it does mean that distillation is only part of the story and that there's something that those labs are doing above and beyond distillation that's bringing the performance up above what the American labs are currently doing.