>they have access to their own in-house secret sauces.

I remember some feature lauded by Gemini was reverse engineered by the open weights guys in < 30 days.

If they dont publish some technical information its hard to protect in the US, but conversely, once it is published smart people from outside the copyrightosphere can start working to reverse engineer it.

>3. The frontier labs are also investing more and more in building an ecosystem around their models.

Theres nothing there that isnt immediately replaceable.

> There's nothing there that isn't immediately replaceable.

Indeed. But that was not my point. My point is that we still have this old impression that training cost is dominated by compute and it is hugely expensive, and the Chinese labs can short circuit that by distilling the American frontier models. I don't think the training compute cost is a big factor anymore for the American frontier models, because of the reasons I gave. If the Chinese models can get the training compute cost down by a factor of 100, that's not going to make them 100 times cheaper, and not even cheaper by a factor of 2. Maybe 10% cheaper or so.