Angelopoulos: Chinese AI Progress Involves More Than Distilling US Models
Anastasios Angelopoulos · Arena CEO: There Will be a $100BN US Open-Source Model & Data is a Trillion Dollar Market · Aug 2, 2026 · at 4:10
Anastasios Angelopoulos is the CEO of model evaluation platform Arena. He addresses narratives regarding whether Chinese AI progress relies exclusively on distilling US models.
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“That doesn't mean that they're not distilling. They may still be using distillation as a sub-step in their training procedure, But it does mean that distillation is only part of the story and that there's something that those labs are doing above and beyond distillation that's bringing the performance up above what the American labs are currently doing.”
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