distilling does not require the models to be released. They simply use the apis.

They have been a source of innovation but probably not in training them.

You can do a rough distill through the APIs. You don't need the weights.

It was much easier when companies had models on the /completion style APIs, because you could actually get the logits for each generation step, and use that as a dataset to fit your model to.

That isn't to diminish the efforts of the Chinese developers though, they are great.