Anthropic stated in February that Moonshot AI (the creator of Kimi) distilled ~3.4 million exchanges from Claude models, as explained in their press release https://www.anthropic.com/news/detecting-and-preventing-dist...
DeepSeek and others like Minimax are publishing deep research on Multi-Head Latent Attention and Mixture of Experts, Multi-Token Prediction, novel Sparse Attention approaches, I mean they trained long context models on a fraction of the resources and gave everyone the recipe.
Chinese labs might not have the funding of labs like Anthropic, but at least they provide the receipts.
Assuming each session was 10,000 words each, that's 34 billion words; lets call it 50 billion tokens (0.05 trillion) unfairly pilfered from Claude. That left Moonshot needing to scrounge for the other 14.950 trillion training tokens required for a baseline frontier model.
They are used for post-training, i.e. calibrating the model to understand and use tools/command line more effectively.
That's an increase of only a single order of magnitude, increasing my estimate of exfiltrated tokens from 0.05 to 0.15 trillion - a far cry from the 15 trillion required.
> They are used for post-training
Possibly - it may be too much data for post-training, unless further curation was done. However, this is not distillation; you know it, I know it, Dario knows it, but "Distillation Attack" is a short, memorable, sciencey-sounding, political sound-bite with enough malevolence to be deployed on the floors of congress, or by the usual fear-mongering newstainment talking heads.
Nobody is suggesting Moonshot used 15 trillion tokens of Claude data to pre-train a base model from scratch. That would be impossible and nonsensical.
This is entirely about distillation, which happens during post-training (alignment and SFT). Here, datasets are measured in millions or billions of tokens, not trillions. 50 billion Claude tokens is far, far than enough to copy Claude's reasoning logic, writing style, and tool-use ability to the pre-trained base model.
> However, this is not distillation
I don't understand how you're so caught up on the term "distillation". Distillation is using a larger model's outputs to train a (weaker) student model. Which is exactly what's happening. It's a standardized term that has been in use for a decade.
It's a PR campaign - when they say its an "attack" they don't mean on Anthropic - but on America itself. What kind of American can let such a brazen attack go unanswered? At the very least, they ought to demand the dangerous, pinko, stolen models be banned in all 50 states, and pay whatever price demanded by the patriotic, freedom-loving, all-American AI labs that can never be accused of stealing.