They are still a few years away from parity. It's not that they _cannot_ train frontier models its that it costs 6x as much roughly, and thats ignoring the headaches and extra hoops they need to gather that compute. That is the entire point of export controls. Slow them down, make R&D more painful. The whole picture -- Chinese research now being best in the world for compute-efficient AI development, China aggressively pursuing independence in compute capabilities -- are all perfectly predictable and do not invalidate the point that export controls are doing their job.

Regardless of any export controls (or really anything else) China would be aggressively ramping up chip production capabilities as fast as they possibly could. Export controls maybe help slightly here but it's worth it. China will succeed too, but it takes time. China has been pursuing this for decades.

> Let's face it - all bans were dumb.

Predictably, this is oversimplifying.

> They just gave China the legal (per WTO rules) justification to start producing everything domestically.

It just doesn't matter, reliance on chips from an adversary is an untenable place to be. They don't need any legal excuses.

> he bans work as a reverse tariff, as a protectionist measure that actually protects your competitor.

Again untrue -- tariffs are devastating economically but BOTH the US and China want independence from another, it's just a very painful cost economically to do the divorce. It's far less efficient and horrifies economists but geopolitics is multifaceted.

> If China did those, others could bring China to court at the WTO. But the US did that, so nobody can sue China.

Hmmmmm would this really work? Would this have any meaningful impact whatsoever on their strategic initiatives? I highly doubt that.