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China isn't at the frontier. OpenAI and Anthropic are.

Surely that wouldn't last long if OAI/Anthropic stopped?

hard to say but it would last some time. china currently is fast-follow mostly via distillation. they don't have the compute resources to catch up. even if their models are more efficient it's hard to beat the folks throwing an unprecedented number of gpus at their models.

If distillation was as easy as that, we would have 100s of competitors around the world.

China is following because they have an army of PHDs in data science and mathematics and capital to make use of them.

no part of what i said implied distillation is easy. it is very costly and requires massive efforts. the payoff is you need less compute, which china is struggling to buy right now.

EDIT:

> China is following because they have an army of PHDs in data science and mathematics and capital to make use of them.

i agree with this too. but compute is the bottleneck.

Surely all of china has the resources to match a single ai lab?

maybe? all of china is not in a unified effort to match a single lab

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