Honestly, I don’t have any sympathy at all. Anthropic can complain all they want, but they seemed fine with pirating books. What Moonshot AI has done is to offer almost Fable 5 comparable performance at lower prices than Anthropic insane margins. This is what I call competition, which the Director seem to embrace.
This is what the Chinese always been good at. Take expensive innovation and streamline it to lower prices. But we are at a point where labs like Moonshot actually contributes a lot to the research field as well. They are pushing the innovation forward and squeezing the prices. Very well done.
Whats even weirder is the bizarre mechanisms Anthropic implemented to prevent distills which they had to sacrifice their customers for. They hid the internal CoT reasoning and returns summarizations instead. This made it difficult for users to trace things. They made Fable 5 silently switched over to Opus 4.8 if it detected blacklisted prompts (almost anything triggered this) to sabotage distills. And now, they are still complaining about distills? So their customers have gotten sacrificed over nothing.
Whats even weirder is the timeframe here, no way the Moonshot team managed to plan conduct a large scale distill, then pre-train, RL, fine-tune, benchmark, marketing and release to their platform since Fable 5 got whitelisted.
they developed a sophisticated internal platform to conduct large scale distillation
I am very curious about this and would love to learn more on how they did this. Wish we had more details. I know the team behind DeepSeek have also done clever things to distill too. I am aware of these ”transfer stations” that acts as a proxy, but I don’t think they are helpful in this case.