There’s no Chinese lab that has been accused by OpenAI or anyone else of distillation. The accusations come from fringe right-wing media that are used to the “China only copies” trope. Training a model, by the way, is not about money, because many Western tech giants have more money than the CCP can allocate to Chinese labs. Apple, Meta, Amazon, SAP, IBM, and others have access to the same data as OpenAI and should thus be able to come up with a SOTA model in under a year, right? On lax copyright enforcement, I’d like to point out that it’s actually Western labs that have been taken to court for stealing content.

On matters protectionism,the Great Firewall was the best thing that China did.It prevented them from digital colonization like the rest of the world.

Oh, wow. 1) you're getting awfully defensive here. I didn't say there was some moral failing because Chinese shops distilled models from western ones. It's the smart play. I'm only commenting on how little of a moat first movers have. 2) if you can't admit that deepseek distilled their models from existing work I'm not sure what to tell you. The early models even identified themselves as chatGPT. It's widely known and has substantial evidence. This isn't team sports, you don't need to play defense. We deal with reality here.

They didn't make a big fuss about it but OpenAI have explained that they instituted ID and country verification because there were competitors distilling their models. Of their competitors do you really think Anthropic, Google or Meta were doing that? It's pretty clear who they were talking about.

Chinese labs are mostly (all?) privately funded, as far as I know. Alibaba isn't a SOE. That's why I didn't mention state subsidies, although that might be happening (and certainly is happening w.r.t. access to electricity).

I didn't mention lax copyright/patent enforcement in the context of AI, but rather, the prior years in which China was able to build up local tech firms capable of taking on the US tech firms. It's mostly in the past now, they don't need to do that stuff anymore.