(FT) Why China is suddenly flooding the market with powerful AI models

The pace of China’s open-source AI push has been relentless. Since the debut in January of DeepSeek R1 — China’s answer to OpenAI’s o1 series — a wave of increasingly capable models has followed. Alibaba claims its latest AI reasoning model QwQ-32B rivals DeepSeek’s R1 and has performed well in official benchmark tests. Every few weeks, another arrives, pushing the boundaries of what open-source AI can do.

Chinese tech groups are taking a very different approach. By open sourcing AI, they not only sidestep US sanctions but also decentralize development and tap into global talent to refine their models. Even restrictions on Nvidia’s high-end chips become less of an obstacle when the rest of the world can train and improve China’s models on alternative hardware.

AI advances through iteration. Every new release builds upon the last, refining weaknesses, expanding capabilities and improving efficiency. By open-sourcing AI models, Chinese tech groups create an ecosystem where global developers continuously improve their models — without shouldering all the development costs.

The scale of this approach could fundamentally reshape AI’s economic structure. If open-source AI becomes just as powerful as proprietary US models, the ability to monetise AI as an exclusive product collapses. Why pay for closed models if a free, equally capable alternative exists?

Read it all.

Why China is suddenly flooding the market with powerful AI models https://t.co/6NGxSWX6Tl | opinion

— Financial Times (@FT) March 19, 2025