[Arkhaine_kupo]

Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

Their cost is not real.

Plus you have things like MCP or agents that are mostly being spearheaded by companies like Anthropic. So if it is "the future" and you believe in it, then you should pay a premium to spearhead it.

You want to bet on the first Boeing not the cheapest copy of a Wright brother plane.

(Full disclosure, I dont think its the future and I think we are over leveraging on AI to a degree that is, no pun intended, misanthropic)

[malka1986]

> Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

So what ?

[antonvs]

It would mean that their costs are lower than they would be to achieve the same capabilities otherwise.

[fc417fc802]

Well it raises an interesting conundrum. Suppose there's a microcontroller that's $5.00 and another that's $0.50. The latter is a clone of the former. Are you better off worrying only about your short term needs, or should you take the long view and direct your business towards the former despite it being more expensive?

[blitzar]

> Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

there are pretty good indications that the american llms have been trained on top of stolen data

[svara]

This is proven. You can prove it yourself easily. Take a novel from your bookshelf, type in any sentence from the novel and ask it what book it's from. Ask it for the next sentence.

This works with every novel I've tried so far in Gemini 3.

My actual prompt was a bit more convoluted than this (involving translation) so you may need to experiment a bit.

[re-thc]

> Their cost is not real.

They can’t even officially account for any nvidia gpus they managed to buy outside the official channels.

[zozbot234]

> Isn't there pretty good indications that the chinese llms have been trained on top of the expensive models?

How do you even do that? You can train on glorified chat logs from an expensive model, but that's hardly the same thing. "Model extraction" is ludicrously inefficient.

[Arkhaine_kupo]

> How do you even do that?

I am not going to comment on how they did it. But they were openly accused by OpenAI of it. I believe the discussion is over destillation vs foundational models.

https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/openai-accuses-deepseek-of...

There are other theories like OpenAI inflated their training costs to seek further investment in later growth quarters. Meanwhile Deepseek under reported their cost to portray China as more cost efficient investment. If that was the case then their performance is similar, with similar training costs but one side reported even the coffee from the coffee machine in the office in the total while the other only counted the minimal CPU cycle cost and not the GPU, energy, engineering etc. Which is plausible too.

I have no dog in the fight but the first accusation seemed quite serious, hence why I asked

[ForHackernews]

This so-called "PC compatible" seems like a cheap copy, give me a real IBM every time.