Are we reading the same website? The predictions for China are completely fantastical - they are not falling behind and if anything the gap is narrowing, and they aren't stealing the weights because they don't need to (distilling is enough). Also the CDZ stuff is just fanfiction at this point.
No matter what happens, people just blindly claim this nonsense is still accurate. We could have AI halt tomorrow and people on Hacker News would still claim AI 2027 is on track.
Distillation only lets you keep pace with released models. By all indication, OpenAI/Anthropic’s unreleased internal models are so far ahead of Astra/Fable and every other lab that the chance of anyone else catching up is rapidly closing.