I think the big picture here is that the difference in quality is largely subjective at this point, while US companies are burning through orders of magnitude of cash which is obviously not sustainable. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of developing things in the open. Chinese open models benefit from the wisdom of an entire global research community while American engineers working on proprietary closed models are working in their own insular silos. It should be no surprise that the scientific community at large would pull ahead of these small teams. On top of that, doing research in the open amortizes the cost. Incidentally, this is exactly the same logic that led open source to dominate in recent years.
I think the big picture here is that the difference in quality is largely subjective at this point, while US companies are burning through orders of magnitude of cash which is obviously not sustainable. We shouldn’t underestimate the power of developing things in the open. Chinese open models benefit from the wisdom of an entire global research community while American engineers working on proprietary closed models are working in their own insular silos. It should be no surprise that the scientific community at large would pull ahead of these small teams. On top of that, doing research in the open amortizes the cost. Incidentally, this is exactly the same logic that led open source to dominate in recent years.