The counterpoint to that, though, is that the Chinese companies have to figure out how to be competitive, regardless of their significant compute deficit. And, as far as I can tell, they're actually doing that. They're trailing the frontiers in model effectiveness, but not by years. It's single digit months.

If there is no upper bound how how these things scale with compute, and if China does really begin to catch up to Nvidia (and they're probably not going to feel encumbered by US patents for domestic AI hardware, given how important AI seems to be to the Chinese government), there will come a day when China leapfrogs the US on AI.