I am sure that some other country (Mistral from France, India, Canada etc.) would have even more chances to innovate perhaps.
and because Chinese models are open-weights, the distillations effects of them could be easier done as well ;)
In my opinion, its a win-win plus even within worst case scenario*, I already believe that the current open weights models are in general speaking good enough perhaps for my and other use cases as well and I feel like we will probably most likely get more open-weights model for a long time in general as well perhaps.
The other countries don't have cheap capital, cheap infra, or scale. The talent is not the bottleneck. Look at how many SV companies are helmed by Indian executives. If the Europeans cared an iota about AI progress, Huggingface wouldn't have been headquartered in NYC.