Chinese firms including DeepSeek, MiniMax unveil new AI achievements, reflecting ‘a period of concentrated breakthroughs’
Ah, the Global Times has looked at the calendar, seen it is July 2026, and declared a 'period of concentrated breakthroughs' for Chinese AI — which is rather like announcing a period of concentrated sunshine while the American weather radar tracks a typhoon named Distillation. DeepSeek and MiniMax have duly paraded their newest parlor tricks in video generation, multimodal understanding, and agent capabilities, and if you believe these are all the fruit of 'years of sustained investment', there's a bridge in Shanghai you might also be interested in. The more interesting question is why US officials are suddenly so keen to talk about 'distillation' — a term that sounds like a chemistry-lab accident but has become the diplomatic euphemism of the decade.
US officials have announced an investigation into Chinese AI companies over 'distillation' of leading US frontier models, which is the regulatory equivalent of sending a parking warden to a Formula One race. The investigators will presumably demand to see the distillation equipment, only to be told it is a metaphor, and not the kind that can be subpoenaed. Meanwhile the models in question have presumably been busy distilling the notice of investigation into yet another training-data point.
None of this should distract from the actual achievement, which is that China now has video generators, multimodal systems, and agents that can plausibly keep up with the American frontier — however they got there. The 'concentrated breakthroughs' may be concentrated in more ways than the Global Times intends: concentrated in a handful of firms, concentrated in a geopolitical rivalry, and concentrated in the gap between what US officials suspect and what they can prove. Years of sustained investment, or a period of concentrated distillation — one of these phrases will age better than the other, and I know which one the lawyers are betting on. Still, nobody ever accused progress of waiting for a clean bill of health.