[frankc]

One of the ways the chinese companies are keeping up is by training the models on the outputs of the American fronteir models. I'm not saying they don't innovate in other ways, but this is part of how they caught up quickly. However, it pretty much means they are always going to lag.

[Onavo]

Does the model collapse proof still hold water these days?

[CuriouslyC]

Not true, for one very simple reason. AI model capabilities are spiky. Chinese models can SFT off American frontier outputs and use them for LLM-as-judge RL as you note, but if they choose to RL on top of that with a different capability than western labs, they'll be better at that thing (while being worse at the things they don't RL on).

[aurareturn]

They are. There is no way to lead unless China has access to as much compute power.

[jyscao]

They likely will lead in compute power in the medium term future, since they’re definitely the country with the highest energy generation capacity at this point. Now they just need to catch up on the hardware front, which I believe they’ve also made significant progress on over the last few years.

[anonzzzies]

What is the progress on that front? People here on HN are usually saying China is very far away from from progress in competitive cpu/gpu space; I cannot really find objective sources I can read; it is either from China saying it is coming or from the west saying its 10+ years behind.

[MaxPock]

If that's how it is done, we'd have very many models from all manner of countries. I mean ,how difficult is distillation for India , Japan and EU ?