I don't think anyone who's paid attention to the LLM scene will give them any “credit for catching up fast” as it has been pretty obvious for the past two years that all it takes to reach the state of the art is a big enough GPU cluster.

Deepseek made the news because how they were able to do it with significantly less hardware than their American counterparts, but given that Musk has spent the last two years telling everyone how he was building the biggest AI cluster ever, it's no surprise that they manage to reproduce the kind of performances other players are showing.