Earlier quoted context omitted.
I took GP as asking for evidence that the reduced-cost Sol is actually a distillation of the previous-cost Sol. AFAIK, providers distilling or quantising models and offering them as the same model have not been proven.
I doubt he was claiming that. He's probably saying that the ability of Chinese companies to be able to distill frontier US models has put downwards pressure on the price of all models.
Alternatively, modern AI is good enough at optimizing its own kernels that it just keeps pushing costs down. Unlike the semi-decentralized inference provider community, OpenAI has both the talent and the compute to throw at the problem of making their models much more efficient to run.
GPU kernel optimization is just the kind of well-bounded problem with clear success criteria that AI loves.