I did some tests. I found it interesting that in the reasoning content the model identifies itself as Kimi by moonshot and sometimes it assumes ChatGPT as identity. Then sometimes it references the need to be approved by "the evaluator", other times it references global system guidelines / moonshot guidelines, and something about an phantom instruction line being "you are an assistant responding in an API" or something like that.
All models do this, they can't even answer what specific model they are
Could it be because Claude / ChatGPT are the most viral models and thus are more likely to be in the training set so when someone asks "Which AI are you?" the likeliness of Claude and ChatGPT being a reasonable answer is higher?
I think the implication is heavy distillation.
It has been observed again and again that ChatGPT and Claude would identify themselves as DeepSeek when asked in Chinese, through the API without a system prompt to solidify their identities. I don't think identity is a good evidence for distillation.
An alernative, it could also be the case that all of the model developers are using distillation to improve their models while crying do as I say, and not as I do.
There's no reason to train the model to be precise there. You always have this information externally, so why would anyone spend time and money ensuring this gets answered? (Then you have to correct again for RL updates)
In our own benchmark we found that K3.1 pro UI designs are very similar to OpenAI's designs.
K3 for reference had 0.43 similarity to OpenAI's models, now it's as similar as how OpenAI's models are to each other at 0.58, much higher than other cross-lab similarities.
It likely identifies itself as ChatGPT because Moonshot AI used ChatGPT distillation. We know they previously also used Claude distillation.
Or because ChatGPT produced texts exists on the internet now. I remember before destillation was a thing when Claude was new and it said it was chaptgpt (probably because ChatGPT was the only popular LLM ai at the time)
Long-horizon RL symptoms perhaps?
perhaps a simpler explanation; that kimi occasionally proxies through to ChatGPT. Possibly for A/B testing, or to gather data for training purposes.
ChatGPT output is watermarked, but I guess the "invisible unicode" trick is easy to circumvent, and TextGrain is only activated for EU users.
Only Gemini and Claude output is watermarked.
GPT reasoning content is encrypted if it was re-routed you would have nothing to see here but that won't stop idiotic American conspiracy theories to spread I see.
Odd behaviour that's unexplained creates conspiracy theories. That's a self created problem here.
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> Chinese models train on US models.
All companies are doing all kinds of desperate things to build up their massive training corpus. Perhaps everyone already forgot all the news on the massive copyright violation campaign that US companies have been continuously committing in the name of training models?
> US models are more advanced than Chinese models and don't.
That's only your wishful thinking. As Kimi K3.1 Pro shows, even their open weights models are beating frontier models from US companies. Even if you want to dismiss them for allegedly distilling other models,you would need to explain why they are still beating the distilled model?
All people are doing something doesn't make this something legitimate. Try harder.