James Kynge

So I would say all of this to me means that the rivalry has entered a new phase.

The White House is talking about exploring measures to hold foreign actors accountable.

That's the phrase they use for industrial-scale distillation campaigns.

To me, I think the important thing is that politically, geopolitically, this is a step change.

It is like...

the US law enforcement agencies are limbering up to really get moving on the AI frontiers with China.

So what is distilling?

It's basically the scenario in which a Chinese AI company would send hundreds of thousands or millions of prompts

probably from proxy accounts through VPNs to camouflage their source, to a US LLM.

That's a large language model.

And then it collects all the replies that it gets, and it collates all those replies, and that allows it to develop a sense of the decision-making patterns of the U.S.,

large language model, its reasoning, its confidence levels.

It effectively allows it to kind of map what the algorithm behind the target LLM is.

To me, this is what this distillation is like.

Now, just to give China their say, they say that the US claims are entirely baseless.

They say they're a slanderous smear against the achievements of China's artificial intelligence industry.

But, you know, whatever the truth is, it feels like both sides are getting more acrimonious that the temperature on the AI competition between China and the U.S.

is getting stronger.

But what's your sense, Alice?

How do you see it?