> Notably, Hy4 preview also contributed to its own development process, participating for the first time in the automated optimization of training methods, data strategies, evaluation frameworks, and low-level operators. The model proposed approaches, ran experiments, and iterated based on the results, with the resulting code, logs, and feedback feeding into subsequent rounds of exploration. This established an early-stage recursive self-improvement loop.
This reminds me of one of the predictions from https://ai-2027.com/ . Only that there it's "OpenBrain" doing this, not the Chinese. And the authors of that paper were also slightly wrong about "Mid 2026: China Wakes Up": China woke up already a while ago. And:
> But China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies—among the best in the world—double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain’s weights.
No need to steal anything, they have already caught up.
And then there's this prediction for February 2027:
> Officials are most interested in its cyberwarfare capabilities: Agent-2 is “only” a little worse than the best human hackers
If the distillation "attacks" created useful inputs to open weight models, ai-2027 was directionally correct that the Chinese would find ways to extract IP from western firms. (Scaled account creation and grinding outputs etc is not a dramatic story element as spies, though!)
Whether the distillation has constituted "attacks" or has or will meet the bar of "stealing" IP is not super interesting to me, though.
It's actually turbo boring and predictable. Capitalism has long since standardized on out and out lies to influence public perception and government action.
The idea that distillation is a significant contributor to the capabilities of the Chinese models is not true. Kimi K3 came out 2 weeks after Fable and uses a number of novel NN architecture innovations.
The AI 2027 paper/website is exactly the same as random guesses from tech bros after a couple of beers telling you what they think the future will be. It has nothing to do with political theory, economic theory, game theory, or any other quasi-scientific or rigorous evaluation of real world events and predictable outcomes. It's just vibes. If they're wrong nobody will notice, if they're right people will call them geniuses.
Don’t need a “better” hacker if you have ten thousand AIs all trying literally every single possible thing to exploit a system with. The main issue is that this will eventually bring down the exploitation cost enough to target very minor targets who weren’t worth it before.
This reminds me of one of the predictions from https://ai-2027.com/ . Only that there it's "OpenBrain" doing this, not the Chinese. And the authors of that paper were also slightly wrong about "Mid 2026: China Wakes Up": China woke up already a while ago. And:
> But China is falling behind on AI algorithms due to their weaker models. The Chinese intelligence agencies—among the best in the world—double down on their plans to steal OpenBrain’s weights.
No need to steal anything, they have already caught up.
And then there's this prediction for February 2027:
> Officials are most interested in its cyberwarfare capabilities: Agent-2 is “only” a little worse than the best human hackers
I think we're past that point now, too…
Whether the distillation has constituted "attacks" or has or will meet the bar of "stealing" IP is not super interesting to me, though.