It goes the other way around as well. DeepSeek has made quite a few innovations that the US labs were lacking (DSA being the most notable one). It's also not clear to me how much of distilled outputs are just an additional ingredient of the recipe rather than a whole "frozen dinner" so to speak. I have no evidence to say it's one way or the other, but my guess is the former.
Citation needed, SOTA labs surely has technical protection and legaleese against using them for training. It's been done in th past but what indicates this is still the case?
Someone has to do the baseline training, development, and innovation. it can't be clones all the way down