Isn't this an indication they are already in the lead? They currently have the best model that beats everyone on all quantitative metrics? Are you implying that the US has a better model somewhere?

They aren't in the lead. They are very close behind, but that's not hard given the quantity of freely published papers. They keep proving they can train models competitive with US models, but, only months after the fact. And at least some of the Chinese models were trained via distillation from US models. Probably not at Alibaba but it seems at least some models were.