"When DeepSeek released its buzzy AI model, developers celebrated its high-performance and low compute costs-and the Chinese research lab's decision to release the model on an open-source basis, allowing anyone to download and tweak it for their own ends. Chinese AI developers, large and small, have released a series of open-source AI models throughout 2025, impressing outside developers and showing that China is able to catch up in the race to develop this new technology."
"Open-source models, particularly from China, now may be starting to edge out the proprietary models rolled out by U.S. firms like OpenAI. Even some U.S. businesses are starting to think about Chinese models: Last month, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that his company had started to use Alibaba's open-source Qwen model, which he said was good, fast and cheap."
""China is focused a bit more on diffusion, while the U.S. focuses more on perfection," Chan Yip Pang, executive director at Vertex Ventures SEA and India, said at the Fortune Innovation Forum in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia on Monday. Chinese AI models tend to be cheaper and more lightweight, enabling them to spread into the mass market."
DeepSeek launched an open-source AI model that combined high performance with low compute costs and broad customizability. Chinese developers released multiple open-source models in 2025, narrowing the gap with competitors and prompting some international businesses to adopt Chinese models like Alibaba's Qwen. Chinese models emphasize diffusion through cheaper, lightweight designs that facilitate widespread integration and mass-market adoption. Open-source releases accelerate innovation and access but reduce guaranteed customer support and raise enterprise-level reliability and safety concerns. Some enterprise leaders warn about limited support in open-source environments, while many observers still view open-source AI as a preferable long-term option.
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