Great presentation from Nathan Lambert at "The Curve" on the state of open source models.
Link: https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1f1Et0Mz8zb1yVCnCgdYSy4tAa0Kv_gKT4wPEg1XPdUA/edit?slide=id.g38edb366806_0_6#slide=id.g38edb366806_0_6
The rise of the Chinese ecosystem has been blistering, starting from negligible downloads at the start of 2025 to well over 50% share in September of this same years, compounding across ~20 different organizations.
Qwen's ecosystem in particular has been on a tear, emerging as the starting point of choice for AI developers. It's interesting to think through the incentives of Chinese Labs and whether they will continue to open source.
- Continuing to lag the US closed source models, open source is a great way to close the gap
- Leading in open source is fantastic marketing to continue to attract top AI talent
- The willingness to pay for software / AI in China is de minimis, leading large ecosystems to monetize gains AI capabilities through adjacent products
- The Chinese government is highly focused on AI diffusion through the rest of society with its "AI+" initiative; ubiquitous, free intelligence is aligned with that vision
- Culturally, DeepSeek has set the tone for open sourcing SOTA level models which will be a difficult precedent to challenge and remain competitive.
Overall, my read is that China seems likely to continue to open source based on the above incentives. If the US does not want Chinese models to become the starting point for every developer looking to tune or post-train an AI for their product, they have some work to do...
