Seems obvious to me, though, that you can't beat China by pausing when they don't, and China is not likely to coordinate.
A lab of researchers without compute isn't going to accomplish much, there is a huge physical footprint unlike bioweapons research. But, the political aspect is unsolved.
I said IF the US and China agree to joint monitoring, THEN we could verify how much compute existed and what it was being used for.
YES, China will catch up in chip production, but if each side allowed the other to track GPU production and deliveries, on the ground, it would be very hard for either player to have secret LLM training facilities capable of training frontier models.
So yeah, it has worked.