My (unverified) AI research claimed generally Chinese models are cheaper to train because Chinese data scientists are cheaper to hire and they're also under more pressure to optimize training cost due to limited hardware availability

Seemed believable but not sure where that's true

Chinese AI companies are generally smaller tho and the models they're releasing are also smaller (I think estimates put OpenAI and Anthropic SOTA into trillions of parameters)

I can't imagine even with the crazy salaries at frontier labs, staff costs make much of a difference.