"Frontier labs" makes it sound like there's some special sauce to these companies. There isn't, other than very smart people working on problems.

Guess who else has that? The Chinese companies developing open weight models. In fact, the vast majority of AI science comes from China. They might still be playing catch up in some areas, but they're also leading in others (famously DeepSeek's inference architecture as an example).

There is IMO a non-trivial chance those labs will eventually surpass the US ones and become themselves "frontier", and that may happen sooner than a lot of people expect.

Of course, it still remains to be seen if they will keep publishing the weights at that point.