I have been very impressed with the Qwen3 series. I'm still evaluating them, and I generally take LLM benchmarks with a huge grain of salt, but their MoE models in particular seem to offer a lot of bang for the compute. But what makes you so sure they will take the lead?

Deepseek, Qwen, GLM (quite good). All being open and available for local use definitely puts them ahead in that space, which means a lot of the tinkerers and younger people learning to do things like train and fine-tune are getting good with Chinese models and I do think getting in early like that is a great way to gain mindshare in a space. Look at Apple or Microsoft doing everything they could early on to get their machines and software into schools as early as possible.