Comment by WarmWash

I don't doubt China wouldn't be capable of making SOTA models, however they are very heavily compute constrained. So they are forced to shortcut compute by riding the coattails of compute heavy models.

They need a training-multiplier breakthrough that would allow them to train SOTA models on on a fraction of the compute that the US does. And this would also have to be kept a secret and be well hidden (often multiple researchers from around the world put the pieces together on a problem at around the same time, so the breakthrough would have to be something pretty difficult to discover for the greatest minds in the field) to prevent the US from using it to multiply their model strength with their greater compute.