From an ecological perspective, western frontier models are a common pool resource that Chinese open weight models exploit. They are finite, because if you exploit them too hard, they lose the incentive and resources to train new models, and everyone loses. (Chinese models aren’t magically good, they are good because Ant and OAI spend a lot of money on training). If you think about it like a parasite/host relationship, Chinese models are a parasite that needs to calibrate its exploitation so that the host doesn’t die. Kimi arguably made a mistake. It overexploited the host and imperiled the Ant OAI growth story. So at equilibrium you’d expect open weight models to “tastefully” exploit the western frontier and choose to remain 6 months behind and slightly inferior capability wise. However perhaps Kimi, Qwen, GLM, deepseek etc may not be playing an equilibrium game. They might be under orders to puncture the American lab growth story, even if it means killing their own host. Maybe the time is now because OAI and Ant are most vulnerable ahead of the IPO. Maybe Xi just had a bad day. Or maybe Kimi defected from the gentleman’s agreement that the Chinese labs share to not kill the host that they all rely on.