The distillation explanation is classic American exceptionalism: No one could possibly do anything unless they were copying American leaders (where "American" means a bunch of Chinese, Canadian, Europeans and Indians working in the US).

It's also a bit of securities defensiveness. Pretending that you really do have a super moat, people just keep swimming in it so you just need to add more alligators.

It's farcical. Anyone who has worked on large models knows that the premise that an almost-Fable model was trained with distillation is beyond ridiculous. It's theoretically possible if they spent tens of billions of dollars on API calls, but it isn't the magic that somehow these people keep convincing people it is.

Previously Anthropic has reported on some Chinese firms doing chicken-shit level of API calls, that at most would be doing some Q and A or final fine tuning. The notion that they're training these models via it is fantastically ignorant nonsense that only very ill-informed and gullible people fall for.