So, unlike what leaders of western labs labs would like you to believe (that Kimi is just the result of distillation attacks), they are introducing new and novel approaches.
Even if they are distilling, I don't particularly care. Anthropic and others have been distilling copyrighted material by to build these models, largely without permission.
People don't remember now, but in the old HN comments like "this is so true honestly" would have been downvoted. If a comment just agrees with the parent, people would have said that's what the upvote button is for. Adding a "I agree" comment is just noise.
Also Reddit-style humorous replies were frowned upon because they ruin serious discussion and encourage karma chasing as opposed to providing valuable insight.
With all the botting and slop going on right now on HN I'd say these once annoyances are now quite arbitrary. I'm sure it bothered you and maybe one other person at this point in time, but it's pretty damn easy to scroll past it compared to actively reading comments that you half way through realize are just LLMs.
To be honest, comment like yours were also frowned upon haha. If you think something is bad for discussion, downvote. If you think something is objectionable, flag it. And now I have made a faux pas by explaining the rule to you rather than just downvoting and moving on. Its turtles all the way down today.
"Kimi is largely a byproduct of distillation" and "Kimi is introducing new and novel approaches" are not mutually exclusive, and I'm not sure it's clear from the paper how much of the improvement comes from the new approaches. So I wouldn't take the new approaches to be much evidence about whether the distillation attacks occurred.
I thought there is discussion circulating around whether the main reason Kimi is impressive is due to distillation. Though possibly if this occurred, this was just one component of their training pipeline and not a majority