Once they catch-up their censors will have a super power and people will have their writings censored before they hit submit.
Will be an interesting decade.
Does China innovate in this way? I think software is not a linear function of money in, value out. Inventing new programs and techniques is interesting as I’m sure what the spark is, and it certainly takes money, but that’s not the most important part.
I remember reading in Masters of Doom about how John Carmack came up with some of the innovations id software used and was amazed that he, alone, came up with stuff that large, well-funded teams could not.
I expect that China could have invested its entire GDP into stem and AI for the past 10 years and would not have came up with LLMs and ChatGPT. Or perhaps they did, but kept it secret and would never release it as a product to the public.
But I believe the former based on the few software companies and few software innovations coming out of China in the past 20 years.
Time will name the winner.
Much of the LLM capabilities have to do with the generality baked into language. Pairing that with the well known proof that GNNs are dynamic programmers, you can get some very nice properties directly from the setup.
No unfiltered training data, and severe penalties if the AI hallucinates something that is against the party line.