I would say airplanes fly, but I wouldn't say that submarines swim. Things have a bit more nuance, and the field of "learning" isn't as well understood as the ML proponents claim it is.
Honestly, I'm not sure. But I do know that there is an entire field of cognitive science dedicated to understanding learning, and quite frankly it's in its infancy. Evidence of this is that every elementary school introduces new teaching techniques from time to time, and very rarely do they result in any benefit to the people who are doing the learning (more often they benefit consultants...).
However, the current process of "Machine Learning" (which is a semi-random parameter descent/evolutionary replacement process) is unlikely to be equivalent to the way people learn, because we aren't copying/competing/replacing our brain constantly. People are actually very good at learning, but our brain material replaces itself partially and relatively slowly (when compared to how a neural network is trained).
Never said it was.
Still, understanding to what extent the ability of Chinese labs to keep up to western models with much less compute needs to be understood.