⚠️Are US AI models being distilled by Chinese Competitors?Plus: ChatGPT Users by Country: India leads the Chart.
ChatGPT is growing faster overseas, led by students’ usage. Also, Chinese models are becoming a concern over their advanced video outputs, allowing anyone to create movie-like scenes, but face scrutiny over using “distillation,” a technique that replicates advanced model capabilities more efficiently. We explain what distillation is, why it matters, and share key tools and resources to learn it.
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SeeDance2.0 generates very realistic videos, and Disney is nervous.
ByteDance, TikTok’s parent company, has launched Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator that turns simple text prompts into cinematic videos with storylines, characters, voiceovers, and sound, positioning it as a direct rival to OpenAI’s Sora and Google’s Veo. The model, integrated into CapCut (with ~642 million monthly active users), can create realistic 15-second clips and is driving rapid adoption alongside ByteDance’s broader AI ecosystem, including its Doubao chatbot with nearly 250 million monthly users. However, the tool has sparked major backlash from Hollywood, with Disney issuing cease-and-desist letters and the Motion Picture Association accusing ByteDance of using copyrighted content “on a massive scale.” Privacy concerns also emerged after filmmakers reported AI-generated voices mimicking real people without consent. To scale its AI ambitions, ByteDance is investing heavily in infrastructure, including plans to deploy over 7,000 Nvidia Blackwell chips in overseas data centers, signaling its intent to compete globally and potentially reshape video production, advertising, and entertainment. 📚Learning CornerDeepSpeed Distillation Documentation
Best for enterprise and large-model distillation Are US AI models being distilled by Chinese Competitors?
OpenAI has warned US lawmakers that Chinese AI company DeepSeek used “distillation” techniques to extract outputs from OpenAI’s models and train its competing R1 chatbot, calling it an attempt to “free-ride” on billions of dollars of US AI investment. Distillation allows a smaller or cheaper model to replicate the capabilities of advanced systems by learning from their responses, giving DeepSeek a major cost advantage. Its V3 model reportedly required just 2.8 million GPU hours using older Nvidia H800 chips. OpenAI also detected obfuscated access methods, including third-party routing and unauthorized resellers, designed to bypass safeguards. Lawmakers and national security officials view this as both a business threat, undermining paid AI services from OpenAI and Anthropic, and a strategic risk, as copied models may lack safety protections and could be used in sensitive areas like biology or cyberwarfare. The situation highlights a growing AI arms race between the US and China, where technical replication, infrastructure access, and chip supply chains, not just original invention, are becoming decisive competitive factors. 🧰 AI Tools of The DayDistillation Tools
ChatGPT Users by Country: India leads the Chart.
India has become one of OpenAI’s most critical growth markets, with CEO Sam Altman revealing that ChatGPT now has 100 million weekly active users in the country, making it the platform’s second-largest user base after the United States and accounting for over 11% of its nearly 900 million global weekly users. Adoption has been driven largely by students, India has the highest number of student users globally, and is supported by OpenAI’s localization efforts, including opening a New Delhi office in 2025 and offering low-cost or free access tiers tailored to India’s price-sensitive market. With more than 1 billion internet users, India represents a massive expansion opportunity, and OpenAI is planning new partnerships with the government to accelerate adoption and infrastructure development. The rapid growth highlights India’s emerging influence in shaping global AI deployment, as major competitors like Google also aggressively target the region, positioning India as a central battleground for the next phase of AI expansion. 🚀 Showcase Your Innovation in the Premier Tech and AI Newsletter (link) As a vanguard in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, we pride ourselves in delivering cutting-edge insights, AI tools, and in-depth coverage of emerging technologies to over 55,000+ tech CEOs, managers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. Our readers represent the brightest minds from industry giants such as Tesla, OpenAI, Samsung, IBM, NVIDIA, and countless others. Explore sponsorship possibilities and elevate your brand's presence in the world of tech and AI. Learn more about partnering with us. You’re a free subscriber to Yaro’s Newsletter. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Disclaimer: We do not give financial advice. Everything we share is the result of our research and our opinions. Please do your own research and make conscious decisions.
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Monday, February 16, 2026
⚠️Are US AI models being distilled by Chinese Competitors?
Friday, February 13, 2026
⚡Coding is Free and Power Scarce. Is there a Solution?
⚡Coding is Free and Power Scarce. Is there a Solution?Plus: AI Is Improving at Math Problems That Stumped Humans for Decades.
Hello Team, Happy Valentine’s Day. Code is now advancing so fast that it’s not just writing software, it’s improving itself and autonomously creating apps and platforms. As Chinese AI models continue closing the gap with Silicon Valley and AI systems grow stronger at math and reasoning, development is accelerating exponentially. The real constraint is no longer talent or ideas, but who controls the compute, data, and capital needed to build and scale it all.
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Coding is Free and Power Scarce
This week’s signals from Spotify, Elon Musk, and insiders at OpenAI and Anthropic all point to the same reality: “Software is becoming frictionless.” Spotify says its top engineers haven’t written code since Dec 2025, shipping 50+ features in 2025 using AI systems that deploy fixes from a phone, while Musk predicts that by 2026–2027. As we shared earlier, code is coding itself, and it will not change anytime soon. AI will bypass programming languages entirely and turn human intent directly into optimized machine code, shrinking the idea-to-product cycle from months to minutes. At the same time, AI researchers are resigning and warning of existential risks as capabilities scale faster than regulation can keep pace, even as valuations surge toward $380B and political spending rises. The common denominator is clear, and it’s that execution is being commoditized, productivity per worker is rising 5x–20x+, and power is concentrating around data, compute, and distribution. Over the next 1–3 years, most software will be built by autonomous agents; within 5 years, human coding will be a niche, with companies of five doing the work of hundreds. The upside is massive, cheaper innovation, faster science, and lower startup costs, but the downside is equally large: rapid job displacement, monopolized infrastructure, large-scale manipulation, and fragile systems humans no longer fully understand. In the AI economy, skill is becoming abundant, code is dissolving, and the real bottleneck is shifting to judgment, ethics, and who controls the machines that now build everything. China’s AI Models continue to close the gap and undercut Silicon Valley.China’s AI race is accelerating as MiniMax launched its new open-source flagship model M2.5, positioning it as a low-cost alternative to U.S. leaders like Anthropic for coding and agentic tasks, a move that helped push MiniMax’s Hong Kong-listed shares up nearly 10%. The release is part of a broader surge in Chinese models gaining global traction, including Zhipu AI’s GLM-5, praised for coding performance, and Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5, which recently became the most-used model on OpenRouter. Together, these launches signal that China is rapidly closing the gap in high-quality, low-cost AI models, increasing competitive pressure on U.S. providers and giving developers more affordable options worldwide. 📚Learning CornerDashboard Builders
AI Is Improving at Math Problems That Stumped Humans for Decades.AI is starting to meaningfully assist mathematicians by rapidly searching literature, combining known results, and occasionally generating valid proofs, helping resolve around 100 long-standing Erdős problems since late 2025. Researchers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind are increasingly using LLMs as research assistants that can cut weeks of work to days, though they still produce large volumes of confident but incorrect results. A new benchmark called First Proof is testing whether AI can solve unpublished problems, with mixed early outcomes. While no major journal has yet published an AI-assisted proof, many experts expect 2026 to be the turning point, positioning AI as a powerful collaborator rather than a replacement for human mathematicians. 🧰 AI Tools of The DayMath Help
🚀 Showcase Your Innovation in the Premier Tech and AI Newsletter (link) As a vanguard in the realm of technology and artificial intelligence, we pride ourselves in delivering cutting-edge insights, AI tools, and in-depth coverage of emerging technologies to over 55,000+ tech CEOs, managers, programmers, entrepreneurs, and enthusiasts. Our readers represent the brightest minds from industry giants such as Tesla, OpenAI, Samsung, IBM, NVIDIA, and countless others. Explore sponsorship possibilities and elevate your brand's presence in the world of tech and AI. Learn more about partnering with us. You’re a free subscriber to Yaro’s Newsletter. For the full experience, become a paying subscriber. Disclaimer: We do not give financial advice. Everything we share is the result of our research and our opinions. Please do your own research and make conscious decisions.
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