Why won’t the AI distillation debate die? Because the economic motive is too large.
GPT-6 Astra’s output tokens cost 50 times what Kimi charges, and 42 times DeepSeek’s price. Anyone who can reproduce flagship behavior from its outputs can sell for far less and still profit.
My yardstick has always been simple: not who resembles the flagship most, but who finishes the task at the most reasonable total cost. And that is proven by testing, not by charts.