They use the ECI - EpochAI Capability Index.
Measured by the DCI the Chinese AI models are about 1.5 years ahead of US models.
DCI = Dust42 Capability Index: MBP Max 64GB, Qwen3-80B MLX 4bit quant, 40 tokens per second. It is not on Claude Opus level but very, very useful if you have no internet, i.e. on a flight. And occasionally it surpasses even Opus by far and large. Opus is a pain in the neck once the coding task at hand surpasses its capabilities. Qwen3 is much better to guide to get step by step to a solution.
Interesting, does it mean they're optimizing for cases where China is disconnected from the internet completely?