Chinese AI labs including DeepSeek closed much of the training gap with US labs such as OpenAI and Google despite the US holding a years-long head start, according to an analysis of the question. The analysis attributes the catch-up largely to open-source research papers and compute availability, while noting the data component of the equation remains unclear.
OpenAI, Google, etc has a years long head start on training. Then Deepseek and the other Chinese labs closed a lot of that gap in a much shorter window. How did they do this? I know open source papers and compute factor greatly. What I don't get is the data part of the equation. Besides US data labs
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