Chinese labs 6–12 months behind the US on data spending, but catching up fast
natolambert · x · 2026-10-13
Nathan Lambert's take on the Chinese LLM data economy: Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance lead spending (unlike OpenAI/Anthropic in the US), Chinese firms like Meituan, RedNote, and Xiaomi prefer in-house model building over APIs and open weights, and Chinese labs lag the US by 6–12 months on data spending while rapidly closing the gap. Industry secrecy makes the full picture hard to assemble.
Related event: Deep dive compares US and China LLM data economies as Chinese labs catch up(2 posts)→
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