We don't know if they're actually more efficient because ClosedAI and Anthropic won't tell us how (in)efficient their models are, whether they're running quants, etc. Kimi K3 is about 3 terabytes of VRAM unquantized so I wouldn't call the Chinese models super efficient either. The "efficient" models are the distillations and particularly quantized versions of some Chinese models. Nothing stopping ClosedAI and Anthropic from doing the same if they're willing to lose a bit in accuracy.