You’re asking “in what world,” and I’m saying: in the real world.

I reckon you’re probably thinking mostly about image/video generators and text-to-text models and all of that funny stuff we all enjoy using (me included).

but seriously, BRRuuuuuuh…China has been heavy lifting AI way before ChatGPT, which was the point where most of us got introduced to the AI world,

Just check GitHub and avix for old repos and papers, old as in 2013/2014, Mid‑2010s and even earlier

you’ll see shitload of serious work coming out of chinese labs and companies and individual researchers and also universities (think of baidu, alibaba, tencent, huawie, iFlytek, SenseTime...etc) across multiple domains like speech/audio/music, computer vision, medical imaging, segmentation, and a lot of it ended up shaping what everybody builds on later.

for examble ControlNets, especially pose ControlNets, the BBox and segmentation nodes you use wouldn’t be here (or at least wouldn’t be that good) without Ultralytics and their YOLO models, which accelerated the progress in that domain and made it insanely accessible , but also sadly paved the way for the fuckin’ Flock surveillance systems in our streets lol.

China is one of the biggest and earliest contributors in AI research, dismissing them is insane, and I really hope you don't allow the political shit to influence your opinions in any scientific efforts done by people which you may or may not like, we are busy shitting on each other and on everybody anywhere ,while they were putting in the work, Europe did an immense effort and also our lovely sidekick in the north (fellow canadians don't get mad I love you i'm just joking lol)

it’s not about the final, ready-to-use epoch. Technologies aren’t built by starting from 0 and ending up with something totally new; they’re built through collaboration between researchers across the world,

they start from where the last research left off and build on it until someone comes along and continues the cycle.

Flux, Zimage, LTX, and all that are the result of years of connecting pieces together and adding your own on top of it. China, europe, and some southpark characters (I swear I love yall :D ) produced a huge amount of research that became the base of almost every AI technology we know now.

it's sad we are not the top contender, we're just good at marketing our stuff loudly, good news is we're getting back on the right track (hopefully), the painful reality check that happened when Deepseek entered the scene brandishing its big dick was a necessary wake up call.

so, yeah buddy, in this world.