I can't help wondering what kind of models we'll see coming out of China once it gets its own chip fabs up and running. Right now it sounds like the US's export ban is not slowing them down a whole lot.
Trump allowed more advanced chips (H200s) to be sold after his visit, because some people in the admin still believe the US can "addict" China to the hardware. It seems China is only letting a token few in, the ban is more on their side now, as Xi really wants indiginous capability.
With subsidization from the Chinese government they will probably be equal to or better than the models here. I mean, have you looked at the author list of any given AI paper published within, say, the past 5 years? I wouldn't be surprised if half or more AI researches are from China.
You mean from the private investors? It seems the labs on both sides of the ocean are quite negative in their profitability right now due to the competitiveness. Though Anthropic claims they will have a profitable quarter this year (despite the huge build-out), so their margins on API costs are likely quite decent.
There does not seem to be a big penalty for going slow anyways. People seem to just switch on cost as soon as a model can do a task well enough. There do not seem to be strong network effects or vendor lock in.
Seems to me that going slow is the better long term tactic. China can just let the USA pay the high R&D costs to figure out what works, then just copy what works.
