Open sourcing models is a marketing strategy. Chinese labs and small international labs have no awareness or distribution, so unless they become a hot topic for a while, nobody is going to bother trying out their models. Open source gets them that, and is essentially a tax on newcomers. When you start out you simply have no other option but to open source your models.

So, the business model of open models is the same as closed models: Sell inference. Open source is marketing for that inference.

https://try.works/#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-re...

None of these models are open source, they are just public weights, with licensing that sometimes but usually doesn't meet the Open Source Definition.

The Open Source AI Definition (OSAID) is quite ridiculous, I prefer the Debian ML policy for defining freedoms around AI.

https://salsa.debian.org/deeplearning-team/ml-policy/

China’s long term goal might just be to own the chip layer alongside everything else, and outproduce the US in data centers.

Frontier US labs could still have an advantage for a long time, but many use cases would start gravitating towards Chinese models if they 10x the data centers and provide similar quality inference for a third of the cost.