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I don't disagree with your main point, there is indeed excessive US triumphalism from some and I was thinking of writing a toplevel post about a separate but similar issue... but what is China going to achieve in AI?
Fable/Opus 5 is not the best thing Anthropic has. They were mucking around with Mythos for ages, at least since late March. Neither OpenAI nor Anthropic are releasing their best models for regulatory reasons and that may be to their advantage considering the inference strain.
China is systemically constrained in total memory output, they're systemically constrained in capex spend. I don't see how they can beat Nvidia in hardware when considering quantity and quality. Is Huawei really going to cast some magic spell and make their HBM3 perform like HBM4? Their gigawatt clusters are desires, not yet real. SpaceX already has a 900 MW datacentre, so does Amazon-Anthropic. Not to mention that a US 1 GW datacentre would be more power-efficient than a Chinese 1 GW datacentre.
And the Artificial Analysis scores don't measure achievement intelligence so much as benchmark intelligence. Have the Chinese models made any great proofs or first-rate discoveries or even autonomously hacked Huggingface? What about the NanoGPT AI speedruns? In all fields, the publicly released US models seem to be superior.
Victory in war goes to the strong I think, not to the adept or cost-effective underdogs. Weight of numbers prevails and in this field alone the US enjoys oppressive superiority. Grok is pulling ahead and Grok was a mess for some time now! How is Grok doing so well - weight of numbers, applying compute and data at scale, exploiting Musk's wealth and infrastructure buildout capabilities. It's a numbers game and the US has the numbers.
I think that if we assess that China is ahead in robotics based on what we can see, statistics and common sense, surely it follows that the US is ahead in AI by some significant margin? Same with space for that matter.
Furthermore, while I know this goes against everything you say on twitter, I just don't think China is AGI-pilled:
Chinese hyperscalers maybe throw another 100 billion annually in the pot. US hyperscalers are spending $700 billion plus.
Fable is just mythos gimped for safety though
They're probably referring to "Model 2", which is their most recent (or at least most recently revealed) internal model. Or just guessing that something like that exists and getting lucky that it's confirmed already.
Anthropic talks about it in their most recent Risk Report (pdf). Mythos -> Model 2 seems like a smaller step than Opus -> Mythos, but bigger than a 0.1-increment release.
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