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This assumes that you can't steal information to catch up quickly, or that progress made isn't easy to copy once it's obvious that it works.

A big part of why chatgpt is a big deal is that it shows that the overall approach is worth pursuing. Throwing stupid numbers of GPUs at a problem you don't know will be solvable is hard to justify. It's easy to throw money at a problem you know is solvable.

Nuclear weapons are the prime example of this: Russia caught up both by stealing information and just by knowing fission was possible/feasible as an explosive.