It's been pretty obvious to me that the Chinese labs are operating mostly on a fast-follow strategy. The distillation attacks are well-documented, and there is good reason to believe they are able to copy architectural innovations as well. If US labs stagnate I would expect Chinese labs to stagnate as well. Their engineering is great, but in terms of frontier innovation (which requires heavy compute to search for new strategies that work at frontier scale) they are very far behind.

The way I see it the Chinese labs are optimizing for other things, including effective compact models that don't need to run on top-of-the-line nVidia hardware.

It makes me happy because it means that these misanthropic technofascists have no moat. They can spend trillions of dollars only for it to be largely copied in short order.

Even if they weren't political adversaries of freedom, I would still feel 0% bad given all their training is already on data they got for free.

Information continues to want to be free. To the benefit of us all.

Well, yeah? I didn't think anybody seriously thought otherwise?