staff writer @TheEconomist. prev in China
London
Joined June 2013
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DeepSeek and Moonshot distilled Astra. Let them
In @TheEconomist this week, we argue that distillation is good for consumers and good for America.
The biggest losers are China's AI labs. They are sacrificing long-term innovation for short-term gains
Corbin Duncan retweeted
In praise of distillation. We (@kuhhbin) argue in @TheEconomist this week against efforts to ban Chinese models trained in part on American ones.
OpenAI and Anthropic may dislike distillation, but:
— Price competition is good for the ecosystem
— Paradoxically, distillation may be good for national security, both in propagating US developers' safeguards on cyber/bio risk to Chinese models, and in keeping China in fast-follower mode
— The US developers' own IP claims here are pretty flimsy, since distillation isn't all that different to the 'fair use' defense they're using for the training data they hoover up.
economist.com/leaders/2026/1…
China’s stock markets are the great global exception
economist.com/finance-and-ec…
from The Economist
Corbin Duncan retweeted
Chinese tech stocks have been getting hammered
"The bearishness has spilled over to broader indices, such as the CSI 300... In October this index met the conventional definition of a bear market, having fallen by 20% from its June peak. "
Corbin Duncan retweeted
What a piece in the @nytimes on Nvidia, Megaspeed and a possible intelligence asset of China. nytimes.com/2026/10/29/us/po…
Corbin Duncan retweeted
i want to take this class!!! wsj.com/lifestyle/harvard-cl…
Corbin Duncan retweeted
So it goes.
Let's see 1017 and 3.1 Pro, as usual
no way they've benchmaxxed this one yet.
Introducing FrontierCode 2.0: our new coding benchmark that measures a model’s ability to go beyond the spec.
Most coding evals measure a model’s ability to write code that meets a spec. With FrontierCode 1.0, we asked a new question: would you actually merge the PR?
FrontierCode 2.0 is comprised of more diverse tasks, featuring larger scopes and higher mergeability standards. We are now asking: not only would you merge this PR, but should you?
One key feature of FrontierCode 2.0 is underspecified prompts. Rather than including every engineering decision, prompts are deliberately ambiguous, giving the models room to demonstrate their judgment.
The result is a benchmark that is far from saturated, with the top model scoring just 45%.
Corbin Duncan retweeted
This table is impossible to read, but this shows that between 2017 and 2025, the number of highly indebted (deep blue, over 50% of GDP) provinces has grown from 3 to 22. Meanwhile, low debt provinces (light blue, less than 25% of GDP), dropped to zero by 2025. Even Shanghai crossed the threshold to medium debt in 2025. (3/N)
Corbin Duncan retweeted
China's STAR 50 Index of leading tech firms is down 40%, losing $480 billion of market value.
These are mostly semiconductor-related companies, like SMIC and Cambricon, and not Alibaba, Tencent, BYD, etc.
In China, the AI bubble has already burst reut.rs/48foPk1
Anthropic says it stopped distillation on its own platform on September 19. Is it possible that the very large jump in OpenRouter traffic is related?
End of history update: Secretary of the Suzhou Municipal Committee, met with Chinese freestyle skiing athlete Eileen Gu, who came to Suzhou to attend the Vogue Fashion Power event
Corbin Duncan retweeted
Moonshot is taking a very interesting approach to cyber for its new Kimi 3.1 Pro model.
Instead of adding safety guardrails during post-training, they removed cyber-related data in mid- and post-training. This tries to address the problem of people fine-tuning away the safety guardrails for cyber for the open-weight model.
At the same time, Moonshot still has a more powerful internal version of the model with full cyber capabilities. Now, like the US, China’s true AI frontier is no longer public.
Corbin Duncan retweeted
When preparing for a podcast this week on effective altruism and business, I wondered who might make a good guest.
Then the obvious answer came to mind: the most famous EA of all time, Sam Bankman-Fried. Notes from our conversation for @TheEconomist. (The full interview is on "Money Talks", out yesterday.)
economist.com/finance-and-ec…
China’s universities are rich. But they're getting squeezed
economist.com/china/2026/10/…
from The Economist
Corbin Duncan retweeted
Interesting new speech from PBOC governor Pan Gongsheng. Covers a range of issues including e-cny. Also echoes what we've been saying @ACGeoEcon - most accurate way to look at international payments is not through Swift alone:
pbc.gov.cn/en/3688110/368817…
cc: @JessicaHoversen @daniel_mcdowell
