There is zero proof of distillation. Minimax 2.7 development was surrounded by moderate use of Claude. M3 is their latest generation, and pretty solid, but its performance cannot be attributed solely (or even 5%) to distillation, and that is only lab that has been accused of significant API use. These claims are all 3-4 months old by now, and Anthropic blocked China access after publishing the accusations. Repeated BS is BS from losers trying to lobby for support.
Also Cursor (recently bought by spacex for $60B) “stole” not only the entirety of kimi 2.5, but all of their users data to train its composer models ontop of kimi 2.5.
article ignores the circular financing bubble. It layers on top all of the hidden costs in servicing their fake revenue and fake stock valuations.
A bigger factor in AI fraud economy, is the circular fake assets and fake revenue. $1T valuations in top 2 LLM providers implies $50B-$100B eventual recurring profits with little to no reinvestment. $1.75T SpaceX valuation was based entirely on fraud of at least 5x more expensive space data centers than earth and supposed 90% of value of company is based on Grok enterprise TAM. IPO was boosted with fake Anthropic paper lease where they were renting gpus for 5x the cost, and over 2x the list price of on demand rates from Nebius/coreweave, but with instant cancel clauses, and “first 2 months free” scam. 11th hour similar Google deal (who owns 6%+ of spacex) further amplified the SpaceX fraud IPO.
The main circular fraud though, is most of the companies (Nvidia not mentioned) in article put an inflated asset on their balance sheet, while trading revenue credits for those investments. Article’s “footnote debt” is largely to serve those revenue credits.
There is no evidence of “theft”/distillation by latest models. Anthropic’s original allegations were weak against deepseek. When someone publishes vibe code to github, it’s not theft from the LLM to train on it. Repeating loser whinning often enough to make it US dogma, doesn’t make it truth. China is a short fuse away from sinking US fleet blockading Iran.
I don’t get the general criticism. It will all depend on details. If you can “rent” a $1000 device for $500 in payments over 2 years, and have the option to pay $500 at end of 2 years, or pay $250 over the next 2 years, then that is a better deal for you, including the delayed payments, and your optionality. If rampocalypse is over in 2 years, you can get a better device. How far away from the above formula implementation is matters though.
An advantage with buying a “good phone” is that Apple needs to keep their trade in incentives high to get you to upgrade later. Lease provides a clear upfront proposition instead of hoping for future Apple generosity.
The AI hype/scarcity frenzy (bubble) was based on Meta and xAI hoarding GPUs for themselves instead of reselling compute, making it abundant instead of scarce. All of the other datacenters were hoping to have them as customers instead of competitors.
2 lies in article:
byline “proves compute is scarce” is opposite. This is not a real datacenter rental deal. It is a “can quit anytime” show deal. Token consumption is down 20% since march peak.
“Compute costs are rising exponentially”. Blatant lie, in terms of compute pricing $/gpu hour. Rates are near their accounting floor (though not at rock bottom) for H series, and the faster newer cards are just 2x the $/hour instead of the 8x saturated performance difference.
It is burying old news in headline. The consequences/pitfalls of their “strategic shift” are fairly new. The layoffs were explicitly justified for pivot to datacenters that OpenAI will “surely” be able to rent. The new extra problems in that strategic shift just makes them look worse for going all in on the bubble.