Meta released Llama just when OpenAI was so hot and its valuation was going through the roof. Speculating, but Meta probably thought the model not competitive enough to keep as a secret weapon but well good enough to commercially damage OpenAI who were a sudden competitor for most-valued-company?

In the same way you can imagine the Chinese government pushing the release of deepseek etc to make sure no one thinks the US has “won” and to keep everyone aware that a foreign model might leapfrog in the short term future etc.

At some point though if OpenAI/Antropic/Google plateau or go bust then the open source sponsorship becomes less likely, as making it open source was a weapon not a principle.

I disagree. I think deepseek, qwen, and kimi earn a lot of trust open sourcing their models. While still profiting.

Effectively they are saying "yea don't crowd our data centers with small queries, go ahead and send your frontier questions to our frontier models. Oh btw those us models? You can run something about as good for free from us if you want hah." It's a power and marketing move. It's also insanely smart to keep up with it to remain sustainable as a brand. Especially given how small their investments into this are.

Look at anthropics growing pains. Deepseek has other hosts spreading their brand for free while they grow. Brilliant honestly. In my opinion it makes anthropic and openai look clueless on a lot of levels.

China is playing a different game here. To them this is commoditizing their compliment and building good will. The Chinese economy doesn't teter on the brink of collapse to deliver frontier grade LLMs. Nope, Alibaba just made qwen because it needs it. It needs efficient models. Similarly, in China they manufacture and automate so much more than the US ever could. LLMs to them are a topping not the whole meal like they are in the us.