Yes, but it would seem that Chinese models are much more efficiently trained than the US ones, (i.e. with fewer resources).

Europe doesn't invest nowhere near as much as the US does into tech, so we need to either figure out how to be at least as, and hopefully more, efficient as the Chinese models are (at least in terms of training) or there's little point in trying.

I suspect this is one of the reasons why Mistral's models are somewhat struggling; i.e. US style training costs, but nowhere near as much cash as OpenAI/Anthopic have.

There are multiple European Google alternatives as well for example, but being 80% as good just doesn't cut it. Chinese models win because they are 95-98% as good as the SotA US ones but at a fraction of the cost.