They could, but I can imagine if US keeps on blocking the cutting edge models, China would never ship the cutting edge models and would still make a killing shipping models that are powerful enough for most of business cases
Let’s see how fast China would catch up. This would be a good indicator on how much Chinese companies relied on US frontier models to improve their own
Are they though? I see this as a precautious method by US to maintain AI model superiority so the Chinese companies cannot distill from the US frontier models. Let's see how fast Chinese models would improve without access to latest US models and if they keep on releasing open models
They do see the importance of AI superiority. The whole modern infrastructure as well as national security relies on AI superiority. Imagine a system smart enough to find vulnerabilities and get into any system that’s connected to internet. Which country wouldn’t want to have it
It doesn't matter how much more superior the US's models are if international companies are worried that the US government may cut off access arbitrarily and without warning.
Big boxes with Huawei GPUs and Chinese open models to run inside your company without network access.