Unless something has shifted, “everyone catches up” is because these bleeding edge models are distilled. You don’t see this happening with other European and US labs and the problem isn’t something being ignored. I’m not convinced this pattern will continue indefinitely.
I did no such moral claim. I just noted that the foundation labs are working on technical hurdles to thwart distillation efforts and the cost and quality of Chinese models isn’t likely to keep up with the 6 month lag time everyone has assumed.
I don’t follow. Fair use is a copyright defense, and nobody is suggesting distillation attacks are just a copyright violation are they?
Aren’t they alleging these other companies directly entered into a contract and violated the terms, and in cases where question, answer pairs were obtained without such agreement, it was accomplished by outright wire fraud or theft?
I don't understand on what you are basing this reasoning? If a well educated workforce can produce Fable then why couldn't a well educated workforce produce MiMo?
Besides, the latter actually published and open-sourced its RL stack to make it reproducible, which would in fact make it more trustworthy than the models you are speculating were distilled.
