It's remarkable how effectively China is salting the earth for OpenAI, Meta, Anthropic, Google, and X.ai with a small fraction of those companies compute capacity. Sanctions tend to backfire in unpredictable ways sometimes. Reasoning models aside, you can get a free GPT 4o - grade chatbot at chat.deepseek.com and it actually runs faster. Their API prices are much lower as well. And they disclose the living Confucius out of their methods in their technical reports. Kudos!
I don’t think it’s necessary intentional salting anything. They just want to win. And that has the side effect of someone else coming second
When you try to sanction 1.3 billion people, what you are really doing is to sanction yourself.