There have been many reports that they're training in other countries.

(On mobile so can't search, but this was yesterday:)

> "Oracle was providing a staggering 22.6 percent of China's known A.I. computing power"

In Malaysia, etc.

https://thezvi.substack.com/p/ai-180-no-longer-in-charge

> With that difference in training speed, it should be impossible for Chinese models to close the gap that easily.

They have a big advantage in that they can directly distill from frontier models.

> I think one evidence is that the US has more than 5x the compute of China. With that difference in training speed, it should be impossible

How could we really know how much "compute China has" in reality? Is it possible that whatever estimates people has come up with for both China and the US might not be 100% accurate?

I'm not an expert but I think this sort of thing is relatively traceable for two reasons. One, datacenters are difficult to conceal. Two, the supply chains for many of the relevant materials are difficult to conceal. Some of those supply chains still require western components, I believe, so if you know how much of X component was sent to china, you know how much compute they have.

In China and in the US most owners of computing power have to quickly gain from it, as obsolescence hits hard. In China a consensual will emitted by powerful companies may convince the central power to subsidize efforts towards int'l market domination: R&D, including dataset building, learning... Maybe even also low prices obtained by selling at a price inferior to the costs...

This is kind of my intuition as well.

I suspect that the models we don’t see are decidedly better than the models we do see.