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by joe_the_user 500 days ago
just to be clear, I doubt that deepseek was produced via distillation

Yeah, your technical point is kind of ridiculous here that in all my uses of distillation (and in the comment I quoted), distillation is used in informal sense and there's no allegation that DeepSeek could have been in possession of OpenAI's model weights, which is what's needed for your "Distillation (term of Art)".
1 comments
ada1981 500 days ago
I’m not sure why folks don’t speculate China is able to obtain copies of OpenAI's weights.

Seems reasonable they would be investing heavily in plaing state assets within OpenAI so they can copy the models.

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joe_the_user 499 days ago
Because it feeds conspiracy theories and because there's no evidence for it? Also, let's talk DeepSeek in particular, not "China".

Looking back on the article, it is indeed using "distillation" as a special/"term of art" but not using it correctly. IE, it's not actually speculating that DeepSeek obtained OpenAI's weights and distilled them down but rather that it used OpenAI's answers/output as a starting point (which there is a different method/"term of art").

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