I believe you are right. These models are at worst a 6 month lag to the costly frontier models, but the ability to scale energy production is years ahead of where the US is. That advantage is often under appreciated
Their cost of energy is what matters vs the US as much as speed buildout.
I'm still not entirely clear on the problem <-> capability matching. E.g. it seems like Kimi K2.6 with good context would already be able to solve a huge chunk of problems. What share of prompts require frontier models?