China’s AI performance under compute limits and a two-to-three-year chipmaking forecast

A September 23, 2026 post shares remarks attributed to Elon Musk from a CCTV interview. He praised Chinese AI models despite their limited computing resources, saying China was probably doing “by far the best” in performance per unit of compute. His “rough guess” was that China would address its compute constraints through lithography and chipmaking in about two or three years.