Regardless of whether it’s intellectual property or it isn’t intellectual property, it doesn’t actually matter. If AI doesn’t stop seeing diminishing returns in scaling up, and it hasn’t yet in the 10 years since the attention/transformers paper, the advent of AI will be the most important development in the history of humanity. Controlling that machine, or at least having one of your own, is an existential problem for nation states. It’s like a matter of national defense.

Do you really think intellectual property laws will prevent this in practice? It’s like as if we said, “hey, USSR, you can’t make a nuke, too! We patented that already.”

Asking China to not distill our models down is equally as ridiculous.

It's unlikely the USA would be granted an exclusive patent for the atomic bomb given the well-established existence of prior-art in the form of nuclear fission on the sun.

(I actually appreciated your analogy, despite my lark)

In fact, China stealing fire from the gods is essential to the future balance of power, so long as they keep making the results freely available.