Eh, I'm not sure I buy it on the frontier labs being all locked up. The Chinese stuff is fucking great, and it's improving really really fast. Labs like OpenAI?

Eh, I'm not sure I buy it on the frontier labs being all locked up. The Chinese stuff is fucking great, and it's improving really really fast. Labs like OpenAI? I'm skeptical they could build their current product lineup from scratch, and why should that be surprising? The people who did it left! Anthropic has a pretty clear headlock on the absolute apex of brute-force Chinchilla scaling with Opus 4, but they've started being dodgy enough with it that I finally set up Together and OpenRouter and put their shit on Bedrock and Vertex: I'm over it with the "well, it lies about having mocked the whole module today". And K2? Whew, that's really refreshing. It's different, hard to compare, but I've been running it for a day or so where Sonnet 4 would normally go and I'm not having any trouble. It's clearly the product of a different culture but in a cool way, and on the stuff that counts? Chinese people speak C++ just fine. I'm pretty sure at this point that infinite NVIDIA is one of the worst handicaps our AI giants could have gotten, and that needing to work within and around export restrictions and gimped cards is the best thing that ever happened to Hangzhou. I see no reason why the take in the article is any more plausible than an alternative future where the US has about as much market share in frontier LLMs as Europe does in consumer Internet.