That seems like a lot of rationalization to me. China is pursuing these because they cannot compete on the frontier. Yes, there is a possibility that all that compute is not needed, but it is a rather remote possibility, and there is no doubt that, given the choice, China would be pursuing frontier model building with closed, propietary-only offerings.

Forgive me if this is a naive assumption, but wouldn’t large language models be fundamentally different for a language that is largely symbols? Again, my understanding of Mandarin is limited if it exists at all.