There is some humor in the fact that china (of all countries) is pioneering possibly the world's most important tech via open source, while we (US) are doing the exact opposite.

I think one of the motivations is undermining US companies. OpenAI and Anthropic are the two biggest players, and are American. Open weights models reduce the power those two big players have over the industry. If the Chinese companies tried to play by US rules and close-source their products then people would mostly use ChatGPT and Claude. So the Chinese companies don't make a ton of profit either way, but by releasing the models as open weights they can at least keep the US from making as much profit.

All great technological advancements have come through opening up technology. Just look at your iPhone. GPS, the internet, AI voice assistants, touchscreens, microprocessors, lithium-ion batteries, etc all came from gov't research (I'm counting Bell Labs' gov't mandated monopoly + research funding as gov't) that was opened up for free instead of being locked behind a patent.

Private companies will never open up a technological breakthrough to their competitors. It just doesn't make sense. If you want an entire field to advance, you have to open it up.

Not entirely true. Google released Gemma 4 models recently. Allen AI releases open Olmo models. However, you're right that the Chinese open models seem to be much better than others - Qwen 3.* models especially are punching above their weights.

This update makes Kimi K2.6 the strongest open multimodal AI model. (No affiliation with Kimi.)

Here's the aggregated AI benchmark comparison for K2.6 vs Opus 4.6 (max effort).

- Agentic: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 5.

- Coding: Kimi wins 5. Opus wins 1.

- Reasoning & knowledge: Kimi wins 1. Opus wins 4.

- Vision: Kimi wins 9. Opus wins 0.

Please note that the model publisher chooses their benchmarks, so there's a bias here. Most coding and reasoning & knowledge benchmarks in their list are pretty standard though.

I'm genuinely so grateful for them

$200/m minimum to use Claude would bankrupt my country's white collar labor market

additional humor is the open in openai

I wonder if there's a strategy behind all of this on China's side. I know the CCP uses a direct hand in many affairs in China, but is there an actual coordinated effort to compete with, or sabotage the West?

This is not in antithesis. My limited personal experience is that I wrote code under OSS licenses primarily because of my past communist believes and current left-wing and redistribution of wealth point of view. This is not to provide the simple equation of: communist China is not interested in money, but also is hard to believe that there is no cultural connection among those things. Single Chine persons want to win, but also they have a different POV on what the collective means, compared to US. Also there is the obvious fact that in this moment China is more interested in winning technologically in AI, more than economically, since, I believe, they more collectively realized before many others that LLMs are eventually commoditized in the current form, in the long run. One could assume that a breakthrough could give some lab a decisive advantage, but so far we assisted to a different reality: it looks like AI is not architecture-bound (like LeCun and others want us to believe, but so far they mis-interpreted LLMs at every step) but GPU bound, and the data-boundness is both a common ground for all, and surpassable via RL in many domains. So, if this is true, it is not trivial for any single lab to do so much better. And indeed as far as we observed right now folks with enough engineers, GPUs, money, can ship frontier models, and in China even labs with a lot less GPUs can still do it at a SOTA level. For me, Italian, this is also a protective layer. After Trump the US looks like a very unstable partner from which to relay in an exclusive way for a decisive technology, and given that Europe is slow to put the money in this technology to have frontier things at home, China is a huge and shiny plan B for us.

It's only humorous if you live in an American bubble. Knowledge sharing has always been a part of Chinese culture. Only Americans try to make it proprietary and monetize it.

Maybe open source == communism

We are at the point where uncontrolled capitalism collides with humanity.

I do wonder where we go from here.