This is not "open source" AI.

Photoshop source code + OSI license = open source

Photoshop binary = open weight

Photoshop SAAS web app = closed model like GPT, Opus/Fable etc.

There is nothing "open source" about the Chinese models in question. All they're doing is allowing you to run their binary yourself instead of through their API.

If you want actual open source then you would need to look at like OLMo 3

https://allenai.org/

It's true that there isn't currently a single Chinese model family that matches the full OLMo/Nemotron end-to-end 'cookbook' one could rightly call "open-source" (i.e. a full manual on how to reproduce your own foundation model by including the models, data, checkpoints, evals, and code for base/thinking/instruct/RLVR)...

But! the Chinese ecosystem does have most of those components, just that they're split across separate projects: MAP-Neo or YuLan-Mini for transparent pretraining, plus DAPO/verl or Open-Reasoner-Zero for transparent reasoning RL.

My bet is it's just a matter of time until there is a Chinese equivalent to OLMo. It won't just be China either - from the public sector across the globe there are efforts ranging from Apertus in Switzerland to LLM-jp-4 in Japan, and more. They're not OLMo-level but I'm sure by 2027 you'll see fully open-source 'cookbooks' help an enterprising individual reproduce frontier models of at least a 2023-2024 vintage.

Open Source AI is challenging. Even tiny models require tremendous resources to produce, so all the things we know about "open source" for software, like a random person in Nebraska can produce a critical piece of the world's infrastructure in their spare time, don't apply.

Actually open source AI is more like scientific research. It needs public funding and reputable institutions as stewards of that funding. I'm hopeful Allen AI is able to do the things, but I'm not sure the US is moving in the direction it needs to be to get to the point where AI in the public interest is something we invest in.

But, also Photoshop is not at all comparable to open weight models. I can't legally give you a copy of Photoshop, but I can give you a copy of GLM 5.2. There are free proprietary applications out there that fit the bill, Photoshop isn't one of them.

Especially since some of the arguments in the article seem to hinge on "just fix the training!", yeah, I think this is a completely fair call-out.

Open weights can sometimes get additional training, but you can't remove existing training, so there kinda isn't a fair claim to "just train it to be [nationality]". That would need "real" open source so you can train a realistically-equivalent model from the ground up.

I sort of agree with your analogy but in another sense, think of Firefox.

Could I have made it myself? No!

Am I grateful that I can have the output of Mozilla’s internal efforts — the browser source code — so that I can at least tweak it and rebuild it myself, and even ship the results myself? Yes!

A open weight model is both an incomprehensible binary blob like Photoshop, but also patchable and adjustable piece of source code, like Firefox.

Chinese models are open-source for purposes of inference: you know exactly what the model architecture is and the code to run it is released under an open source license. The “binary blob” is a useful artifact that has many techniques available to use in the creation of future binary blobs. And it is fixed and reliable.

Contrast this with crap like Claude, where you have no idea how many/what size/shape models you are interacting with. They can silently inject outputs from other systems, apply steering vectors to sabotage a particular user’s work, etc.

I agree that 100% free-range organic open source models are lovely, but they also are unlikely ever to attain parity with the frontier because the training data sources are open and expose them to legal liability that closed model providers can thwart.

This is a great distinction that I don’t think is getting talked about enough. “Open source” is probably the wrong term to use. Open “weights”, sure.

If your only concern is how good is it at coding, then I don’t have an issue with using the Chinese models. Especially if you want to run it locally, they are kind of the only choice.

For any other use than coding, it’s going to have to be a hard pass from me.

It’s a good analogy. One difference is that it would be much more difficult to “fine tune” Photoshop, so there’s a sense in which free weights are more useful than a free binary.