Probably yes.

More than a year ago, when Anthropic and OpenAI started to hide the reasoning bits from the output, a lot of people here on HN predicted that Chinese models days were numbered.

Fast forward to today, and models such as DeepSeek and MiMo are nothing short of excellent. I haven't used GLM or Qwen but heard very good things about them as well.

This "massive distillation" sounds a lot like anxiety about how companies from outside the US can develop very good models themselves.