A Reddit post, in the LocalLLaMA subreddit, raises doubts about the motivations behind Anthropic's recent activities. The user suggests that the company is not primarily interested in distilling language models, but rather in countering the perception that open-source models developed in China are rapidly catching up with the performance of Western proprietary models.

Anthropic's strategy according to the user

According to the user, Anthropic is trying to reassure its investors and the United States government. The argument is that Chinese models, even if cheaper, will never be able to compete with Anthropic's models in terms of quality and performance, unless they resort to unfair practices such as copying weights or unauthorized distillation. The user also speculates that Anthropic may push for greater restrictions on technology transfer to China.

General context

Competition in the field of language models is rapidly evolving, with a growing number of players, both in the open-source and proprietary sectors. The ability to develop and deploy efficient and effective models has become a strategic priority for many nations and companies.