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Kimi K3's quality shows Chinese labs like Moonshot are genuinely skilled model builders, not merely distilling stolen output from closed American frontier models.
Lambert argues the strength of Kimi K3 disproves the 'distillation panic' narrative that Chinese labs only succeed via IP theft from US models. ✦ AI generated
Nathan Lambert · Interconnects · 2026-07-20 · original ↗
It should be clear looking at this model that if adversarial distillation from the closed frontier models in the U.S. contributed, it is at most to a relatively small degree... that Chinese companies are extremely good at building models in the same way the leading American companies are.
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- ·Kimi K3's quality argues against stolen-IP distillation as main driver
- ·At most, adversarial distillation played a relatively small role
- ·Chinese labs build models with genuine skill, not just copying
- ·Moonshot matches leading American labs' model-building capability
- ·Chinese and US frontier labs now operate at similar skill levels
- ·Success reflects real engineering, not primarily IP theft
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