Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez challenges US claims on Chinese AI distillation

One of the AI industry’s most prominent founders just went against the grain of Washington’s preferred narrative on China. Cohere CEO Aidan Gomez, a co-author of the original transformer paper that underpins virtually every modern AI system, told CNBC that characterizing China’s AI progress as mere theft fundamentally misreads what’s happening on the other side of the Pacific. His comments arrived two days after the NSA, CISA, and FBI issued a joint advisory on September 8 naming six Chinese firms they accused of conducting industrial-scale distillation campaigns. Distillation is the process of using outputs from a more powerful model to train a cheaper, smaller one. The case against the copycat theory Speaking on CNBC’s “Tech Download” on September 10, Gomez didn’t deny that some distillation has occurred. What he pushed back on was the idea that it explains the full picture. His argument is simple and hard to dismiss: Chinese AI models are now outperforming their US counterparts on various benchmarks. If these systems were merely distilled copies, they’d be bounded by the capabilities of whatever they were trained on. They wouldn’t be surpassing the originals. Gomez pointed to th...