> The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US, not because of charity or kindness

There are many other reasons Chinese companies releasing models open-source or open-weight makes strategic sense.

A really easy-to-understand example is a company who has a near-monopoly on "serving video content" releasing a video model openly.

If you can be relatively certain that video content created by a model (which you have trained, using data from your own platform) will be ultimately served on your own platform, thus generating revenue from watch-hours, it makes sense to make those models as widely-available as possible.

It's also a net-positive if people use your public research to build better video models, because - again - you are reasonably certain that the even-better content those new models produce will be watched on your platform.

The alternative would making models harder to access and learn from (broadly, the current western model). Many would argue that Google, in choosing to not optimise its video generation models for "availability", is directly causing less content to be uploaded to YouTube. This is the trade-off.

I don't know much about DeepSeek's financing specifically, which obviously doesn't release video models - so I don't know how directly this analogy runs, or who directly benefits from the extremely evident rising tide that the public release of DeepSeek's research creates. However, this does not negate the broader rising-tide effect of the scientific method.

It's certainly also true that it's geopolitically beneficial to be able to undercut American labs' models. If I ran a global superpower, I would probably want my country to be technologically competitive too.

But Chinese companies are already serving a huge volume of customers in a complex, existing marketplace, before even thinking about the US market, and it's overly simplistic to assume that their entire strategy revolves around economic warfare directed specifically at the US. It's more nuanced than that.

This is, of course, without even getting into opening the can-of-worms around whether US economic policy also results in the US state functionally subsidising technological innovation, how comparable that is to China's model, etc.

Interestingly if Google did release readily available video models then they'd likely be dealing with an order of magnitude of scale in the same way GitHub has had to.

Causing less content to be uploaded, when you are clearly the gorilla in the room, looks to be a wise strategy not a trade off.