It's crazy that a ~400 person side project by a Chinese firm can put up such a fight.

All other models are also either by <1k labs or side hustles by tech companies who are not particularly known for LLMs

Their success is subsidized heavily by distillation, and even then, the Big Labs are no more than an OOM larger.

Not really. Anthropic’s headcount isn’t huge, and only a subset of their employees are working on the frontier. It’s also easier when you’re a follower.