Today

Teortaxes, an anonymous commentator who has long championed Chinese open models, says no Chinese lab has the compute to chase the next generation of frontier models and the labs will probably stall.

Teortaxes wrote on X on October 29: "not a single Chinese lab has the racks to go for Fable 5.5/Astra/what comes next. We'll probably see them stall." Racks here means server racks, and Astra is OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra (Teortaxes on X, 2026-10-29). That Chinese labs will stall is a personal judgment with no data attached. It also cuts against Teortaxes's usual support for Chinese open models. Teortaxes also wrote that on frontier capability evaluations such as math and end-to-end machine learning research, the US lead is larger than the Artificial Analysis composite index shows, "because the Chinese barely touch them", meaning Chinese labs hardly run those evaluations (Teortaxes on X, 2026-10-29). Neither post discloses an employer or holdings. How we checked →

Concept illustration on a peach background: at left, three black server racks rising in height, lettered CHINA LABS and RACKS, with a laptop showing a speech bubble on top of the tallest one, followed by three taller rack outlines drawn in red dashed lines that step up toward a black floating ledge at upper right, where two laptops showing speech bubbles sit under signs lettered FABLE 5.5 and GPT-6 ASTRA. Below, a black silhouetted figure seen from behind raises one arm and points upward, between two large black quotation marks.

Source and checks

This item ran in the brief of Oct 30, 2026, alongside 13 other items. How we checked it, the quote checks and what was still missing that day are on that issue's How we checked page.

Cite this item

SecondSource (2026). "Teortaxes, an anonymous commentator who has long championed Chinese open models, says no Chinese lab has the compute to chase the next generation of frontier models and the labs will probably stall.." https://secondsource.io/en/expert/2026-10-30-1/. Accessed access date.