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IBL News | New York
China’s adoption and leadership in open-source AI technology is worrying U.S. policymakers and Silicon Valley companies, who are keeping the models proprietary.
Chinese advances in open source are coming one after another this year, with DeepSeek, Alibaba’s Qween, Moonshot, Z.ai, and MiniMax.
The open source or open weight models all have versions that are free for users to download and modify.
In the past, Microsoft’s Windows operating system for desktops, Google’s search engine, and the iOS and Android operating systems for smartphones were a few of the examples of proprietary models’ dominance.
In its AI action plan released in July, the Trump administration acknowledged that open-source models “could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research.”
The report called on the U.S. to build “leading open models founded on American values.”
For now, open-source initiatives have had slim gains. Proprietary models have spent hundreds of millions of dollars developing free access to models.
• Many businesses like open-source AI because they can freely adapt it and put it on their computer systems, keeping sensitive information in-house. Moreover, they can avoid being locked into any one model.
• Researchers have long embraced open source as a way of accelerating the development of emerging technology, since it allows every user to see the code and suggest improvements.
• Fearing being cut off from American technologies, the Chinese government has encouraged open-source research and development not only in AI but also in operating systems, semiconductor architecture, and engineering software.
• Meanwhile, the Trump administration worries that if Chinese AI models dominate the globe, Beijing will figure out a way to exploit it for geopolitical advantage.
• Engineers in Asia said Chinese models were often more sophisticated in understanding their local languages and catching cultural nuances, as they are trained with more data in Chinese, which shares similarities with some other Asian languages.
WSJ: China’s Lead in Open-Source AI Jolts Washington and Silicon Valley
