The US is approximately 6–8 months ahead of China in frontier AI model capability despite chip export controls.

Chinese frontier AI models are roughly 6-9 months behind US models due to distillation.

“The Chinese are very capable, very smart, and also definitely distilling these models to sort of stay about 6 to9 months behind.”

The US is approximately eight months ahead of China in frontier AI model capability, despite chip export controls.

“We're kind of eight months ahead in terms of where the frontier model is like our frontier model versus their frontier model.”

Leading Chinese LLMs are approximately 6 months behind US models in capability.

“The leading LLMs in China are probably 6 months behind where we are in the US in terms of the capability of their models.”

Training a model close to frontier capability is not technically hard today, and many actors are achieving this not just via distillation.

“It's not hard to train a model that is close to frontier capability.”

Other AI developers are only 3 to 6 months, and certainly less than a year, behind OpenAI in capabilities.

“Other developers are not that far behind probably not more than 3 to 6 months certainly not more than a year behind open AAI in their capabilities.”

Within a few years, the lead time at the AI frontier will shrink from months to weeks or days.

“In a few years it'll be more like weeks or days.”

DeepSeek achieved GPT-4-level performance at 1/600th the cost of GPT-4.

“Deep Seek, for example, on GPT-4 was 1/600 the cost.”

Publicly available AI is approximately 10 years behind what US intelligence agencies already possessed.

“My belief is that everything we have access to, like AI, we probably have something that the US intelligence had 10 years ago.”