My friend, the Chinese have been releasing amazing models all last year, it just didn’t make headlines.
Tencent's Hunyuan Video is incredible. Alibabas Qwen is still a go to local model. I've used InternLM pretty regularly… Heck, Yi 32B was awesome in 2023, as the first decent long context local model.
…The Janus models are actually kind of meh, unless you're captioning images, and FLUX/Hunyuan Video is still king in diffusion world.