I don’t think anyone seriously believes any of the Chinese models are ever going to “overtake” the American frontier models. I doubt that that’s even their goal.

But if they can stay on pace, within say 6 to 12 months of the bleeding edge of the American frontier models, that’s a huge problem.

If they can just piggyback on the Herculean efforts of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google etc., accept a little bit of lag, and save billions of dollars? Why wouldn’t they?

And for the end user, why would they pay a premium subscription price for something they can just wait six months for and run on their own hardware at home? In my opinion, this is the cat and mouse game that’s being played right now. And I suspect it’s intentional on the side of the open weight models. I would bet they are playing a war of attrition