The U.S. says China's AI progress is down to 'distillation.' But is it that clear cut?

U.S. officials claim China's AI progress relies heavily on 'distillation,' a technique of training models using outputs from advanced models, accusing it of copying. However, Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez argues that Chinese AI has developed strong independent capabilities, with some models outperforming U.S. counterparts on benchmarks, challenging the notion that their progress is solely due to distillation.