They are as “underdog” as Linux is to Windows.

your translation is correct, I would say Chinese labs may be able to figure out the current capability of latest frontier models in 3-6 months, but then Anthropic and OpenAI may have already been ASI in that time already. China's main problem is still lack of (good) chips, and that is a hardware issue that is unlikely to be solved for a while. and more effort for efficiency means less effort for actual capability improvements. we have already seen what anthropic can do if they focus on efficiency with opus 5.5