We haven't had any new models from China for a while. Just a bit ago, they were shipping every other week. Here's what happened. I genuinely was (and still am) rooting for China because cheap open weight models benefit everyone and help keep the closed labs in check. The amount of capability that they were able to pack into low-parameter models that could run with limited compute was impressive, but it's now abundantly clear that China's AI labs are struggling. It's no secret that they distilled Anthropic's and OpenAI's models, but how much weight that truly carried was previously unknown. It's known now: the answer is apparently a LOT. The AI race is at its zenith, and there's essentially no other reason for the recent drastic slowdown with Chinese AI labs. Now of course, there is the chance that they're gatekeeping their most frontier models internally, potentially due to political or business-related reasons, but this is unlikely. Much of China's success comes from dominating specific sectors on pricing, which is why Chinese dropshippers dominate Amazon and Walmart. It's the reason China's the world's most successful producer, because no one else can compete with their pricing to quality ratio. Their strategy with AI is similar. Ultimately, they can't afford to not release their models, because it's the premise behind their entire business model, and from a political perspective, China also sees significantly more benefit in releasing said models versus keeping them behind closed doors. Anthropic and OpenAI have essentially fixed distillation, and clearly this is having a massive impact on Chinese labs. I'm still rooting for them and their open weight models, but without true compute, things are looking bleak.