Nathan Lambert Says Chinese LLM Data Spending Is Rapidly Catching Up

What happened

Nathan Lambert calls a piece on China’s LLM data economy the best he has read so far on how it compares with the US. He says Chinese labs seemed 6–12 months behind US labs in willingness to spend on data, but are rapidly catching up, and notes that Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance lead Chinese spending rather than OpenAI and Anthropic.

The story so far

Nathan Lambert said Chinese LLM labs are rapidly catching up with US labs in their willingness to spend on data, after appearing to lag by 6–12 months. He identified Tencent, Alibaba, and ByteDance as the leading Chinese spenders, in contrast to OpenAI and Anthropic in the US. Lambert made the assessment while recommending an article on China’s LLM data economy, calling it the best comparison with the US he had read so far.

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