Do they have more access to capital than the CCP, if the latter decided to put its efforts behind Alibaba on this? Genuine question.

many of these labs have more funding in theory than OpenAI. FAIR, GDM, Qwen all are subsidiaries of companies with $10s of billions in annual profits.

Maybe truth here, but also Microsoft didn't lead their latest round, which isn't a great sign for their moat

But access to capital is highly dependent on how interesting you look to investors.

If you don't manage to create a technological gap when you are better funded than your competitors then your attractivity will start being questioned. They have dilapidated their “best team” asset with internal drama, and now that they see their technological advance being demolished by competitors, I'm not too convinced in their prospect for a new funding round unless they show that they can make money out of the consumer market which is where their branding is an unmatched asset (in which case it's not even clear that investing in being the state of the art model is a good business decision).