[jychang]

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.

[roenxi]

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.

[csomar]

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.

[Barbing]

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.

[sameersri2004]

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.

[state_less]

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.

[rcxdude]

if it's open source there will be many potential providers, though.

[tmpz22]

If only we had established means of pooling community resources for the public good

[corimaith]

You know a statement like this just makes Chinese big tech look bad right?

[tw1984]

> 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?

[hurtigioll]

selling LLMs is much more profitable than trading, and with much less risk

[fn-mote]

> much more profitable

I think you made this up.

Right now, I don’t believe any LLM company is profitable at all.

Unless you meant “more profitable” to mean “not-as-badly-negative profit”.

[ls612]

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.

[Slartie]

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.

[Al-Khwarizmi]

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.

[wongarsu]

As a private citizen, yes.

But at work the calculus is entirely different. There is already lots of exposure to US companies (guess where our emails and tickets life), so the increase in espionage risk from adding another American company is small. Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited. But adding the first Chinese company to send data to would be a major risk. One nobody would sign off on, given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information

[dofm]

Not sure why anyone in the EU thinks the US is not a significant espionage risk. Adding any major US supplier would have been a significant espionage risk until really recently.

Before the EU cleaned up Europe's act pretty considerably on corruption, US companies used corporate but also state-level espionage actors to level the playing field against a culture of bribes and they were fairly open about it. They absolutely needed to do it, because of the potential penalties back home if they engaged in bribery abroad.

The tables have turned, now. The EU runs much more cleanly than decisionmaking in DC, which is clearly corrupted and lubricated with cash and opportunities for failsons and faildaughters; it has accelerated radically quite recently but it was heading that way from the first Bush era.

But I'd bet the corporate-state merger of industrial espionage is in full flow.

[stickfigure]

This would require active participation by people inside Anthropic and OpenAI. Given how generally ideological the people working in these companies are, I'd be willing to bet that we would already be reading Snowden-style leaks if it were true.

I have zero expectation that a similar culture exists inside Chinese companies. If you think these corporate and national cultures are the same, you need to adjust your priors.

[rvnx]

> given the general reputation of the Chinese economy for widespread espionage, disregard for copyright and producing copies of successful products using insider information

Quite funny because if you use that phrase verbatim except swapping China with the US it could actually fit.

Good governments try to do things that are in the interest of their population, and yes it could mean opposite interests to your/someone else governments.

No reason to blame US, Israel, China, Russia, etc. They just defend their piece of cake.

[59nadir]

Anthropic and OpenAI are not just "another American company", their entire business (and industry) was created based on stealing data and using it for profit. You make this point about "another company" so casually that you'd think you added a SaaS bill for generating thumbnails or whatever. The exact same point you make about China can be made much more confidently and with stronger evidence for the entire modern LLM lab industry.

Again I have to echo the previous poster's point: Most people outside of the US really do not see the US as some much better alternative than China. If anything, in the specific area of LLMs, China are the ones doing work benefitting the everyman whereas almost everything the US labs do does not.

[wongarsu]

That's why I added "Not zero, and trust towards AI companies is limited". Reaching the decision that adding one single US-based LLM provider had more benefits than risks took months. And we were selective about who that would be (hint: not OpenAI). And I know companies who are not willing to go that step, using open-weight models on their own infra instead. But outsourcing inference to China was never even a serious suggestion. The notion is absurd to us

That said, I imagine e.g. South Americans thinking very differently on this front

[crote]

I'm not sure I agree.

China indeed has a general reputation for widespread espionage, so any Chinese company wanting to expand into the European market has to prove it isn't spying on its potential customers. US companies have traditionally been seen as friendly, so their platforms are essentially built around "trust me bro" guarantees.

In a world where both China and the US are now seen as hostile-by-default, this might actually leave some Chinese companies with an advantage in their ability to demonstrate trustworthiness.

[dofm]

The blurring of US state and corporate espionage in the EU is the stuff of legend. They have always spied, and you can easily make the case that in late 1980s/early 1990s Europe they had good reason to, because European businesses were corrupt.

[tripzilch]

> disregard for copyright

what did you think US-based AI is trained on

I'm pretty sure the US just jumped to the front of the list with their biggest IP heist in humankind history

[rvnx]

Totally agree, though it is an unpopular opinion here.

It’s the same paradox as people claiming: “we are European, our data is safer in Europe” when actually your privacy is higher when your data is stored in China (or Russia) you are safer because it is out of reach from your local government.

The only thing I dislike, and that’s no matter the service, is that my data or information usage is shared with third-party.

For example, Anthropic conveniently forgets to mention Datadog has tons and tons of information about Claude users, or that your data transits through machines they don’t operate.

[crote]

Safety has more than one definition. Being able to sue the company in small claims court when it threatens to delete your account is also part of that, and so is being able to pay for the service when Russian companies are once again put on a sanctions list.

[WarmWash]

China wants everyday people data because some of those people will get power one day, and China wants to be able to leverage knowledge of you, perhaps even "deep dark secret" data, if they need to.

[viking123]

Israel already does this through Epstein information from all the cameras and microphones that were listening and filming all the powerful people who visited the Island and the houses. They probably have a new Epstein already.

[dariosalvi78]

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.

[nxm]

Doubtful that’s happen

[FpUser]

This sounds like a really strong argument

[Barbing]

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)

[rvnx]

Sounds perfect, sell it to me.

I use LLMs for health, design and programming.

If you want to make a political or religious pamphlet it’s not a single LLM that you should base yourself on. No matter where it comes from.

[throwa356262]

Serious question: why would sending data to China be worse then the US?

[londons_explore]

With nearly everyone using inference accelerators, the pool of hardware is no longer shared between training and use.

[SubiculumCode]

No, they are open sourcing them because they don't have another play, being second/3rd tier lans

[rupx]

Kimi 2.7 and GLM 5.2 released today and are open source.

[c0rruptbytes]

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)

[chabes]

Qwen does closed and open. This is not new.