I'm pretty sure this isn't what happened. DeepSeek just hasn't released a big model upate. But in the meantime, Qwen, Bytedance, Ziphu and Moonshot AI have released extremely impressive models, some of which are SOTA or close to it. The open source/open weight world is still in love with Chinese labs as they keep releasing cool stuff and filling the void left by Meta and Mistral.
What these Chinese models have that is interesting is that they are much cheaper to run and they are open source. This has pushed the other closed source SOTA models to make all the big updates we have seen the last few months. I guess we can thank these Chinese models for creating some competitive pressure, which has pushed the forefront, but they aren't doing so by leading the forefront.
The wall always had two functions, the obvious blocking from getting people in, but it also blocks from getting your people out
1) https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/china-is-banning-eroti...
As China develops and becomes richer eventually the idea of moving from Shanghai to New York no longer looks as attractive.
To become the next Rome, China would have to open up and let itself be infected by the rest of the world. It's a rite of passage, with no guarantee that it will have the constitution to endure the culture shock and the subsequent fever. How do you expose 1.4 billion minds to new perspectives, while also keeping everyone paddling in the same direction?
* Economic growth slowed down significantly under Xi Jinping compared to his predecessor Hu Jintao. Also, while Xi handled the start of the Covid pandemic well, he sort of fumbled the recovery afterwards with too heavy-handed quarantine/daily testing policies.
* China has demonstrated that it's super good at AI stuff, publishing lots of papers, having extremely talented engineers at Deepseek, etc, but after Deepseek stunned the world with the R1 model, subsequent models got heavily censored and languished in relative obscurity.
* China continues to have a brain drain of talented scientists and engineers to the US and other parts of the world. A large proportion of the top talent at Google, OpenAI, xAI, Meta, etc, are Chinese-American.
* From my anecdotal experience, many young people in China feel helpless and unmotivated due to the hyper-competitive environment and lack of opportunities. It is common to find healthy young adults who would rather "lie flat" than work. Together with an extremely aging population due to the one-child policy, this does not bode well for the future.
Anyway, I just wish China would just continue opening up, namely to get rid of the great firewall. In the age of information it is lame that information flow in and out of the country is so restricted. On one hand, as this article points out, the rest of the world is ignorant of the advances in China. On the other hand, the Chinese people are also ignorant of many things outside.