China increasingly depends on copying American AI

The idea of distillation is simple. In the early stages of training, large language models (LLMs) are usually taught to mimic text on the internet. Distillation teaches them instead to mimic other LLMs. The words generated by American models exhibit precisely the sorts of skills and reasoning Chinese developers want their own models to learn. As such, their output is useful fodder for training. American developers on the frontier have no more advanced models to distil, and the text on the internet is all but exhausted. They instead increasingly rely on a less efficient technique called reinforcement learning (RL). It…