The mandarin language models obviously exist, but what would you do with them if they provided access to them? And what knowledge would be in them? What is the body of knowledge encoded in Mandarin? What does that look like?

Sad reality is that not many outside of China have the facility with Mandarin to use those models. Even non-native Mandarin speakers who claim to be "fluent", are often messing up intended meaning in text. Or making literal translations that wind up making no sense.

Inside of China, llm use will be Mandarin based. Outside, it seems to me English is the natural choice.

Irony of Irony, probably the best way for a non Mandarin speaking layman to test a Mandarin based model would be to use another LLM to translate prompts to Mandarin.

It's a sad future we're looking at.

Or a brilliant one.

Time will tell.