Oh how badly I wish this was true.

How much easier my life would be if Chinese open models were even just 1 year behind outside of X posts and one-shots.

My easy litmus test is would the year old model (Opus 4.5) being open sourced today would eat the traffic of every single Chinese model... and the answer is pretty much yes.

Every Chinese model would throw away their work just to post-train or distill Opus 4.5 and get a more reliable model.