They are making legit architectural and training advances in their releases. They don't have the huge data caches that the american labs built up before people started locking down their data, and they don't (yet) have the huge budgets the American labs have for post training, so it's only natural to do data augmentation. Now that capital allocation is being accelerated for AI labs in China, I expect Chinese models to start leapfrogging to #2 overall regularly. #1 will likely always be OpenAI or Anthropic (for the next 2-3 years at least), but well timed releases from Z.AI or Moonshot have a very good chance to hold second place for a month or two.