But it sounds like, from that quoted statement, that LeCun from Meta thinks “open sourced work” is why China was able to surpass (or at least compete with) American AIs. Which sounds like a lame excuse for Meta.

Putting too much thought into the statement Meta's chief AI scientist made about how the new AI innovation is actually because of Meta is probably not going to be fruitful.

I think we should hold ourselves to a higher standard than this. I don’t see why we couldn’t apply reasoning to this question just like any other.