"Who's Afraid of Chinese Models?" — the open-weights gap becomes a strategy question

Simon Willison's latest lands alongside a wave of similar takes this week (Gary Marcus, Stratechery, and a 1,200+ point HN thread) arguing that China's open-weight labs — DeepSeek, Qwen, Kimi — have closed most of the capability gap to closed US models. Several independent voices converging on the same read in one week is itself worth noting.