If China mainly distills models, does it really threaten US AI labs?
JeffBezosHater · reddit · 2026-09-28
A Reddit post challenges the math behind the 'China AI threat' narrative: if China lacks compute, researcher headcount, top labs, and VC influence, and its main innovation source is distilling US models, then even if OpenAI and Anthropic vowed not to release a model until ASI, China wouldn't come close to their internal models within the next year.
The post sparked debate about the ceiling of distillation, the compute gap, and catch-up speed — a recurring argument in AI circles on the US-China model gap.
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