[maxloh]

I personally doubt that.

It would be a shame if they cannot beat Kimi K3 or Qwen3.8 Max, both of which are claimed to be Fable-like. If that is true, it will be [or would be] the first time a major American lab falls behind a Chinese competitor.

[chrsw]

Google can't compete with China, neither can Meta. Only two labs in the US can keep chucking billions at the frontier race. Everyone else has a real business to run.

China can keep up because it's cheaper to run a frontier lab there. They also have more researchers and a stronger cultural inclination for this sort of thing. And I guess the business case in China doesn't have to work as well as it does in the US.

[janalsncm]

> China can keep up because it's cheaper to run a frontier lab there

Not sure if this is what you meant, but their training runs are significantly cheaper. This was one of the big shockers from the Deepseek R1 paper. US foreign policy has helped to ensure that the Chinese are compute constrained, so they literally cannot buy the most expensive and powerful training rigs.

This has led to a steady drumbeat of innovations which are not revolutionary on their own but stack together to make things much more efficient.

[chrsw]

China will accelerate on ML research and optimization regardless of US export control policy. They want to win or at least not lose just as much as the US and will pull every reasonable lever at their disposal to do so. NVIDIA and the US government have no say in this.

[le-mark]

I’ve often thought it was the cost of electricity and crypto mining being banned a few years ago. China has a lot of “stranded electricity” which fits this usecase well.

[janalsncm]

Checks out. China has 10,000 TWh, the US only has 4,000.

[vikramkr]

I think they've been behind for a while - flash isn't even that competitive with glm 5.2 and from their hype around 3.5 flash at launch - that was certainly not intended to be the case