Ai Model Distillation

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OpenAI’s Astra Model Becomes Top Distillation Target for China’s AI Labs

By Jing Yang, Juro Osawa and Qianer Liu · Oct 28, 2026 6:00pm PDT
OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, the most powerful model the company has released, has met with strong demand since its release in early September. One growing customer base: Chinese AI labs that look to extract Astra’s capabilities. DeepSeek and Moonshot AI, two of China’s leading AI developers, relied heavily on outputs from Astra when training their own... OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra, the most powerful model the company has released, has met with strong...
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China’s AI Model Race Is Just Getting More Crowded

By Juro Osawa · Oct 9, 2026 6:01am PDT · 1 comment
Imagine Epic Games, Apple and DoorDash were developing their own large language models now from scratch to compete against the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic. That’s basically what’s happening in China, where a trio of big names from other parts of the tech industry have jumped into an already-crowded race to make cutting-edge AI. MiHoYo, a... Imagine Epic Games, Apple and DoorDash were developing their own large language models now from...
ByteDance founder Zhang Yiming. VCG/Getty Images.
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ByteDance’s Founder Rules Out Distillation on AI Models

By Juro Osawa and Qianer Liu · Aug 5, 2026 6:19am PDT
ByteDance won’t resort to distillation as a shortcut to advancing its AI model capabilities, even if that means the company lags behind domestic rivals for now, founder Zhang Yiming told employees during a meeting last month. One reason, say people close to the company, is ByteDance’s complicated history with the U.S. government over the... ByteDance won’t resort to distillation as a shortcut to advancing its AI model capabilities, even...
Art by Mike Sullivan
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How China’s Token Resellers Create an Anthropic Gray Market

By Jing Yang, Juro Osawa and Qianer Liu · Oct 2, 2026 6:00am PDT
In Beijing’s Haidian District, a bustling hub for local universities and tech companies, six out of the roughly 30 tenants in one run-of-the-mill office building are all in the same business, according to one occupant of the building: selling Chinese customers access to Anthropic’s Claude and other models from U.S. AI companies. They’re not... In Beijing’s Haidian District, a bustling hub for local universities and tech companies, six out...
Tencent headquarters in Shenzhen. Photo by Cheng Xin/Getty Images
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Tencent’s New Model Shows Improvement, Partly Thanks to Anthropic

By Juro Osawa · Apr 28, 2026 6:00am PDT
Chinese tech giant Tencent’s latest AI model has generated positive reviews from developers. But the company probably owes some of that success to Anthropic. Tencent employees used Anthropic’s Claude to assist them with evaluating and fine-tuning the model, known as Hy3, to improve its performance, according to two people with direct knowledge... Chinese tech giant Tencent’s latest AI model has generated positive reviews from developers. But...