Tech News
← Home  ·  All topics

Model Distillation

7 GoKawiil briefs on this topic

Y Combinator's Garry Tan Opposes Crackdown on AI Model Distillation

Amid accusations that Chinese firms like DeepSeek and Moonshot AI distilled outputs from OpenAI and Anthropic models, U.S. security agencies issued a joint advisory warning about the practice. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan pushed back, arguing regulators should avoid restricting distillation and instead focus on balancing open-weight and frontier AI models, while suggesting smaller U.S. labs use similar techniques on domestic frontier models.

Moonshot AI aims to double revenue to $2 billion by year-end

Chinese AI lab Moonshot AI is targeting $2 billion in annualized revenue by the end of the year, according to Bloomberg, roughly double its reported run rate in August. The push is fueled by strong adoption of its open-weight K3 model, which OpenRouter data shows generating up to 300 billion tokens daily, even as usage has dipped slightly in recent months.

Y Combinator's Garry Tan opposes crackdown on AI model distillation by Chinese firms

Garry Tan, CEO of Y Combinator, said at the accelerator's Demo Day that regulators should take no action against AI model distillation, even as OpenAI and Anthropic accuse Chinese firms like DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, and MiniMax of copying their models' outputs to train cheaper alternatives. His comments come days after the NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory warning about the practice.

US intelligence agencies name DeepSeek, Alibaba, five others in AI model theft warning

The NSA, CISA, and FBI jointly identified six Chinese AI companies—DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI—as running large-scale campaigns since late 2024 to extract the underlying capabilities of leading US AI systems like Claude, GPT, Gemini, and Grok. The agencies said these firms likely operated with the Chinese government's awareness and used tactics such as mass fake-account API abuse and prompt injection to expose hidden reasoning processes.

FBI, NSA, CISA Accuse Alibaba, DeepSeek and Others of Mass-Distilling US AI Models

US federal agencies issued a joint advisory on Sept. 8 alleging that Chinese AI companies including Alibaba, DeepSeek, MiniMax, Moonshot AI, StepFun and Z.AI have run large-scale operations to pull outputs from US models like Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since late 2024. The advisory says these firms extracted billions of tokens through millions of queries, using techniques such as chain-of-thought extraction and automated evasion to dodge blocking measures, in order to train their own competing systems.

US agencies accuse six Chinese AI firms of mass model-distillation attacks on US chatbots

CISA, the NSA, and the FBI issued a joint advisory naming DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun, and Z.AI as having harvested billions of tokens from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and xAI models since late 2024. The firms allegedly used fraudulent accounts, proxy networks, and automated failover systems to bypass rate limits and extract restricted reasoning data at industrial scale.

US agencies accuse DeepSeek, Alibaba and other Chinese AI firms of mass model distillation

The NSA, CISA and FBI issued a joint advisory alleging that Chinese AI companies including DeepSeek, Moonshot AI, Alibaba, MiniMax, StepFun and Z.AI extracted billions of tokens from US frontier models such as Claude, GPT, Gemini and Grok since 2024. The agencies say this data was used to train competing systems like DeepSeek's R1 and Moonshot's Kimi K2/K3, describing the practice as 'distillation activities at an industrial scale.'