> whether or not Ant/OAI can stay ahead of the Chinese models.

Ant/OAI/Google are way ahead when it comes to the smartest, largest-scale and most compute-intensive models. By Jevons' paradox, if you make inference for leaner models cheaper (as the Chinese models do, being broadly comparable to GPT Terra or Claude Sonnet; barely approaching Opus/Sol at their very best) that only increases demand for the complementary service of very smart inference.