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Comment by ProphetOfParado | Hacker News Reader

Food for thought: Constraints are the source of creativity.

Yeah if they had the resources of an OpenAI or anthropic they’d be OpenAI or Anthropic. Scrappy underdogs have to be nimble and innovative.

They are as “underdog” as Linux is to Windows.

Not really, they are underdogs in the true sense of the word.

Let's wait a bit and see how your US frontrunners will age with their operating costs above revenue, model pricing collapsing faster than compute efficiency improvements and cost pressure from DeepSeek and friends.

Possibly relevant: 突破技术壁垒, "break the technical barricade" -> overcome an obstacle through innovation (in this case, sub SOTA GPUs at least).

Native Chinese speakers to confirm....

your translation is correct, I would say Chinese labs may be able to figure out the current capability of latest frontier models in 3-6 months, but then Anthropic and OpenAI may have already been ASI in that time already. China's main problem is still lack of (good) chips, and that is a hardware issue that is unlikely to be solved for a while. and more effort for efficiency means less effort for actual capability improvements. we have already seen what anthropic can do if they focus on efficiency with opus 5.5

This isn’t a law.

Bell Labs would be a good counter example. All the resources in the world and no demands.

General Magic failed with all the talent and all the resources. Cautionary Tales podcast featured General Magic in a recent episode; the basic argument was no constraints led to no focus.

You don't need a counter example to a counter example.

It's not that I think the opposite of the original statement is true, I'm suggesting that's it's just all noise as there are both successes and failures at both extremes.

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