Computer scientists recently discovered a way to extract the hidden “thinking” that frontier AI models perform as they work through complex problems. Lately, however, distillation has become a controversial topic, because of claims that Chinese AI companies use it to essentially copy the best US models. There’s no indication that Chinese AI companies used this specific technique to distill US-based AI models. Companies tend to keep a proprietary model’s reasoning secret to prevent others from using them to train new ones. The researchers’ attack relies on the fact that most AI companies also provide related models of different sizes.