Distillation is so easy, so why is Google and Meta playing catch up with worse models than many Chinese labs? I mean, they could distill from the Chinese modles

Distillation is so easy, so why is Google and Meta playing catch up with worse models than many Chinese labs? I mean, they could distill from the Chinese modles which are free? Why are the American labs models not top tier? Arcee, Laguna, Inkling? Why has Cohere or Mistral fallen behind? Our hubris would be the worse of us if we think the Chinese labs are keeping up because of their distillation usages.