it's hard to quantify how much distillation improves the performance of Chinese models we can't really put a number like 20% on it, but we can compare Chinese labs with other companies that don't distill for legal reasons Google for example has 10-100x more compute than Chinese companies, the best researchers and engineers on the planet. so why are they that far behind the frontier? if I had to estimate where Chinese companies would be without distillation then current Google would be my lower bound (at least as far behind as Google) the only other US company I would be comfortable comparing Chinese companies to is Thinking Machines other US open-source labs simply don't have the size (compute and talent)