# How did the Chinese labs catch up so fast if most of the early training work was in the US? > Source: > Published: 2026-09-23 02:00:18+00:00 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