Their models not only perform just as well but are much cheaper

Sometimes it is difficult to keep up with the innovations that artificial intelligence is leaving us. However, it is also a good sign that there is voracious competition and that, even if we thought that companies like OpenAI or Google had every chance of completely dominating this sector, not all the fish has been sold yet. And what began as a race to create the most powerful models has become a battle to deliver the best performance at the lowest possible cost. And in this new competition, China leads.

Change of third. For years, the conversation in AI focused solely on which model was more capable: who passed more benchmarks, who solved more complex problems, who generated better answers. But that phase is being relegated by another in which price is once again a determining factor in making decisions. This transition marks a turning point, since it is mainly Chinese startups that are demonstrating remarkable ability to produce powerful and extraordinarily economical models.

Qwen leads the revolution. As Kai Williams highlights in the ‘Understanding AI’ newsletterAlibaba’s open model ecosystem, known as qwenhas become the most downloaded model family in the world, according to Hugging Face data analyzed by the ATOM Project. “Qwen alone is roughly matching the entire US ecosystem of open models today,” counted Nathan Lambert, researcher at the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, at the PyTorch conference.

The Chinese company has achieved something that seemed difficult: create competitive models in practically all sizes, from small to 235,000 million parameters, offering options for any business need.

Real business adoption. In addition to the technical figures of their models, the use cases also deserve special mention. In October, Brian Chesky, CEO of Airbnb, caused a bit of a stir stating that his company “relies a lot on Alibaba’s Qwen model” because it is fast, cheap and powerful enough. This statement is interesting because of the context, since we are talking about a top American company preferring to use an open Chinese model, something that is powerful enough to change the perception of the industry.

Williams points out in the text that, in addition to Airbnb, there are also other companies that would prefer to adopt Qwen’s models, but for reasons of image or regulatory compliance, they cannot. Mainly because they are models from China. And that could be the great barrier for Qwen and the rest of the Chinese models that would make its adoption difficult. So Chinese startups have a big job ahead of them to try to change that perception in an increasingly complicated geopolitical context.

Kimi K2 gave the surprise. If Qwen dominates through volume and versatility, Kimi K2 Thinking It stands out for being possibly the best open model in the world in terms of benchmark test scores. Just like share Williams in the newsletter, Artificial Analysis currently ranks it as the most powerful model not created by OpenAI, Google or Anthropic.

DeepSeek and the domino effect. The launch of DeepSeek R1 in January was the catalyst that unleashed this wave. It arrived just four months after OpenAI announced your first reasoning model, o1but with a crucial difference: DeepSeek openly published the model parameters.

The noise was such that even the DeepSeek app briefly surpassed ChatGPT as the most downloaded app in the iOS App Store, Nvidia shares fell almost 20% days later, and Chinese companies rushed to integrate the model into their products. Today we are still waiting for DeepSeek to speak again with its next deep reasoning model, about which not much is known yet.

On the other side, putting out fires. The United States has not sat idly by. When it comes to open weight models, OpenAI launched theirs in AugustIBM published its Granite 4 models in October, and Google, Microsoft, Nvidia and the Allen Institute for AI have also introduced new ‘semi-open’ models this year. But none have reached the level of the main Chinese open models.

Lambert, who has led efforts to advance a new generation of American open models, acknowledges that progress has been slow and the gap is widening. Everything indicates that 2026 will be decisive in determining the pace of adoption by companies and, above all, in determining the choice of model in an increasingly immense ocean.

Cover image | Xataka with Mockuuups Studio and Kimi AI

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