Do you have any source for any of that? Also haven't people been saying that China would be hopelessly distanced for the better part of 2 years, only to be proven wrong over and over again? Deepseek-r1, kimi k3, etc.

I've seen the same sentiments/reports, from X accounts known to talk to leakers.

People said the same about mythos, and o3, and gpt-4.

Most of the very recent spectacular achievements (math conjectures) were done by leveraging datacenter capacity (throwing agents and millions' worth of compute at the wall until something sticks), not any secret sauce intelligence.

That's not true, actually.

The last round they said they averaged one prompt, one agent, and 3 hours' work.

it is quite widely known that the chinese models are just quite shit for math. i think for coding tasks they really do quite alright.