From what I gather, the Chinese are behind, but a lot of their research amounts to scrappy, clever discoveries in how to use more novel technologies (for Qwen and Deepseek, its mixture of expert models, that can do inference using a portion of the model at a time). The chinese also distill information from American models, so there’s that.

The American companies, from my impression don’t involve themselves with such lowly “hacks” because they have so much money to just push forward with doing everything on big heavy models that run on the most cutting edge nvidia chips that they can, the moment, kinda sorta get on demand (I say that in some degree of jest).