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Unsupervised Learning with Jacob Effron
AI Vibe Check: Chinese Open Models, Distillation & The Hugging Face Breach
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In this installment of their recurring roundtable, Jacob, Ari, and Rob dig into the accelerating Chinese open-source model race, debating whether Kimi K3 has actually closed the gap with the US frontier or just looks like it has, and whether distillation fully explains China's progress. That opens into the messier fight over open-weight models generally, with the group dissecting the backlash against Anthropic's stance and asking whether powerful open models are inherently dangerous or actually a necessary part of collective defense. They connect this directly to the Fable ban episode as a possible preview of a coming frontier-model licensing regime, then turn to the OpenAI and Hugging Face…