Chinese open models close the gap

A wave of open-weight releases from Chinese labs — DeepSeek V4, Moonshot’s Kimi K2, Alibaba’s Qwen3, Zhipu’s GLM — pushed real-world coding and reasoning to within a few points of GPT-5.5 and Claude Opus 4.8, at a fraction of the price. For tool use, Kimi K2 is best-in-class. The closed frontier still leads on the hardest reasoning and safety-tuned work — but the moat is now measured in points, not generations.