Comment by jychang
3 days ago
This is going to age very poorly when the best Chinese labs ALREADY just started not open sourcing their models.
Qwen 3.7 is not open source; previous Qwen versions would have open source releases, but Qwen 3.7 plus does not. The second best Chinese model, Minimax M3, is testing the waters by taking longer and longer between “model release” and open sourcing it. This time, they spent 2 weeks after release before open sourcing it. There’s also a lot of rumors of GLM and Deepseek not open sourcing future models.
It’s pretty obvious that you cannot take Chinese models as open source for granted, they’ll be closed source soon.
If we're measuring progress in hours and days then yes. But if we're measuring progress in months then OSS models are doing fine. You can get a state-of-the art performance in an open model if you pretend it is January 2026 instead of June.
There is no evidence here that the cutting edge labs have any durable advantage. Extrapolating current trends it seems likely that even the Europeans will be capable of meeting any given performance measure with enough time. In fact the evidence suggests that the capital required to run the models is where a moat will develop. Knowing the weights won't help much.
The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose) and glm (coding) and they are both open weight and share lots of their tooling.
There are lots of AI companies and it doesn’t seem that they all have the same funding fountain or share monetization goals. I wouldn’t read much into what each one of them is doing.
Had seen weeks back that the top two non-Western models on ArtificialAnalysis were both closed: https://artificialanalysis.ai/#intelligence-category-tabs
How much stock should we put into that graph, though, I'm not sure.
Even if the models by the Chinese labs are open source or open weights even after they get to mythos level intelligence lets say, still inference and the optimization of those models to be accessed at speeds of 1000 tokens/sec in not in the hands of general public as these models have parameters more than a trillion and they can't be run on some publicly available hardware, So even after being open source it does'nt fix the problem as the general public will still pay the company for inference.
I'm pretty sure these large models are run on Nvidia GPUs, not some unobtainable piece of secret kit. You could go down the street and buy from AMD or a number of other vendors to push out FLOPs if you wanted or needed, but you'll need a thick wallet to shell out for a cluster of GPUs to run these models. The reason people don't run the big Chinese models at home is that they can't afford the hardware, not that it isn't publicly available. This tech is essentially a large amount of matrix multiplications afterall.
I think the larger problem is that restricting US AI companies gives the Chinese a leg up because they now have a window open where they can become the source of the most powerful models available due to government restrictions rather than on technical merits. All Anthropic customers just got a downgrade last evening, for example. While the Chinese are able to serve the world or whoever, the US corporations will be limited to the US market, or whatever the powers that be will allow. This restrictiveness could turn out to be disadvantageous to American companies since people will migrate to wherever they can get the most powerful models.
if it's open source there will be many potential providers, though.
If only we had established means of pooling community resources for the public good
You know a statement like this just makes Chinese big tech look bad right?
> The best chinese models are deepseek (general purpose)
DeepSeek is developed by the largest Chinese hedge fund, their models used to make them $ on the share market are very profitable, they've never ever released anything on those models.
Somehow you are claiming that those same group of people are going to totally change their very consistent long term behaviour and start promoting openness when they are in the global leading position in AI?
selling LLMs is much more profitable than trading, and with much less risk
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The main reason the Chinese labs are releasing models as open weights is because they don't have the compute necessary to provide all of the inference. For the US frontier models something like 80-90% of the lifetime compute required for the model is inference rather than training. China wants to shepherd as much of their limited compute as possible towards training to keep up in the race.
I think the main reason is to minimize the market for closed-source models from US companies.
China knows that doing what Anthropic/OpenAI/Google/... are doing is impossible for them. No one outside of China in any sane condition will send their data to compute farms IN CHINA like people currently do with US-based frontier models. Even if they could muster the inference power.
Hence they do the second-best thing possible to attack the dominance of the US-based corporations: reduce their moat by open-sourcing models that are not fully equal, but practically useful and good enough for easily 90% of typical tasks people use agents for in their daily lives. But way cheaper to run.
As long as this arms race in AI continues, China as "number two" will have some incentive to continue open-sourcing models. But of course the US government might force a change if they continue to enforce limited public access to new frontier models - there is no market to minimize if a model is not allowed to be publicly available.
I'm European and I don't see sending my data to China as more risky than sending it to the US. Rather the opposite.
I think your vision of how the rest of the US sees the world is tinted by a massive bias.
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was going to say this.. open sourcing Chinese models will enforce Chinese dominance instead of reducing it. When an open Chinese model becomes the best alternative to inaccessible closed US models guess what everybody will start to use. And that same open model may embed certain narratives and values that please the Chinese government.
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Ya. You know enough about China to know: would they be willing to sell users outside of China models that aren't fully pro-China (and won't deflect on tough questions)? Or would that be dirty money that they wouldn't want anyone to make?
Like if they could release Ch-ythos 6 tomorrow BUT it had Western ideals, would they take the fame, clout, attention, & profit, or stick to the party line?
(hope the monolithic brush is appropriate, considering, I mean it's an impressive system/country even if I have my own strong preferences - also I've taken as true reporting about their models deflecting etc. on sensitive topics)
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Serious question: why would sending data to China be worse then the US?
With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.
No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans
Kimi 2.7 and GLM 5.2 released today and are open source.
Minimax M3 too, and huawei claims to be releasing non-nvidia dependent training software too. openPangu 2.0 could be a shake-up if it holds up as a good model
China may not care about open source, but they know they will personally fund AI through government investments while US relies on private investments, best way to scare private investments is a free capable alternative for everyone
Add on the fact that they actually invested in energy infrastructure and can offer AI very cheap to their citizens and you can get a population well versed in AI to reduce menial tasks and focus on more productive things (if we're to believe the claims of the technology)
Qwen does closed and open. This is not new.
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