by Imustaskforhelp | 2026-02-23 20:10:05+00:00
Edit: For what its worth, I don't really care about anthropic being scraped because they scrape and torrent illegally every book without any compensation and so many other things that they can't really use this moral card or any moral response at this point for the most part. Their scraping that directly leads to effectively some servers effectively getting Ddosed and so many other things.

Also actually, we all sort of knew this but its interesting to see Anthropic call out such companies in public.

I think that for providing models at 1/20th the cost and open sourcing it while sometimes being much more leaner is an overall win for most part for the general public whose data was questionably stolen by Anthropic and it seems that some court cases about these are still happening.

One of the more curious things I want to say is that Qwen and GLM 5 (Z.ai) are not in this.

Personally I love Kimi the most and maybe we will see in the future from more AI tech companies like chatgpt/google too if they have any proof of distillations as well.

But the fact that Z.ai isn't distilling makes me wonder what and how they are doing it. Qwen models although nice are not the best at the moment so I especially wonder what Z.ai model training does and where they get their training data.

I still love Kimi and I would probably use Kimi but I am interested to know more about the training sources of Z.ai

Also another point but given that Kimi and Qwen are quite tightly linked (Kimi aka moonshotAI is backed by Alibaba aka Qwen) [https://www.cnbc.com/2026/01/19/alibaba-backed-startup-moons...]

And qwen not being in here. Why didn't Qwen also share the data. Or could there be a fact where Kimi/moonshot trained on anthropic and also shared the data with Qwen/Alibaba too but the name of Qwen wasn't available in public ofc?

I can definitely see that being a possibility given that Kimi/Moonshot uses servers hosted on alibaba.

Interestingly for Z.ai I found a quick fact about them from Wikipedia:

In May 2024, the Saudi Arabian finance firm Prosperity7 Ventures, LLC participated in a USD $400 million financing round for Zhipu AI with a valuation of approximately 3 billion USD.

I want to know if z.ai does any large scale web scraping? Where does z.ai get from what I see 15T–28.5T tokens.

I saw this comment from an article:

Pre-training: On a 23T token dataset curated from diverse sources, with emphasis on high-quality data through techniques like SemDeDup and quality-tiered up-sampling.

I think I am interested in this rabbit-hole because if Anthropic has caught them. This will definitely impact the companies in future if Anthropic models get better and they might have to figure out the training data issue which Z.ai might've solved?

I am still extremely suspicious of Z.ai but perhaps someone who has the tech reach on twitter or any other platform (maybe simonw?) could ask them.

I think Z.ai guys are really open people especially within the research community yet I don't think I remember hearing about them intensively scraping as well while we consistently see posts about how American or even Chinese (Baidu most notoriously iirc) who basically DDOS a server/git-server etc.

What are the Z.ai team doing that they don't distill Anthropic, they don't create intensive scraping problems at the same time while still getting good quality data? Does seem to be too good to be true unless I am missing something which I think might be. So if anyone has the expertise, I would love to know more.