This isn’t really true, but it’s kind of true: the final gap (esp in benchmarks) is closed by distilling.
The actually funny part is that this has made all the Chinese models into neoliberal shills. Contrary to what the China hawks think, the proliferation of low-cost Chinese OSS models throughout the world isn’t resulting in (imagined) Chinese subversion. Chinese models don’t actually promote e.g. socialist XJP thought. They just refuse to talk about politics straight up. When they do, they regurgitate the same vaguely left-of-center neoliberal consensus that people have found the US frontier lab models have converged on!
This is a low-key tragedy, because (for those who actually care about “diversity of thought”), the proliferation of Chinese models offers one of the best opportunities to help the Western-pilled world understand how a different way of organizing society and running a government might look like. But, you can’t really get Chinese models to talk about it at all. Instead, the most they’ll say about politics are the distilled neoliberal essence of US frontier models!
(If there’s any more quintessential example of American soft power, that’s gotta be it)
@yishan Chinese models are only good because they distill American models
