bet on the Open Source

China with the Open Source models It is a zasca throughout the mouth For the unbelievations. It didn’t seem logical that the Asian giant Take it like this With the development of artificial intelligence systems open and available for all audiencesbut the truth is that in recent months the country has given a unique lesson the world.

He has good reasons for this.

Above all, taking into account that its great rival, the USA, has adopted a totally opposite position. Except in outstanding exceptions as a goal with flame “That the Chinese models probably inspired,” the large technology companies and startups that try to win the AI ​​race do so with a closed and owner approach. Ours is ours: You can use it, but we are not going to tell you (much) how they work, they seem to tell us.

But in recent weeks China has not stopped demonstrating that another way of doing things is possible. And do them well. Alibaba, Baidu or Tencent have been flooding the market for some time with the Open Source models, Something simply unusual in a country known for its secrecy and its obsession with control.

Until the appearance of Deepseek Everything seemed to follow the expected script in the war between the US and China. The first did not stop imposing vetoes and zancadillas on the Chinese technology industry. Nothing to export advanced chips of AI or to suggest the secrets of our technology.

China was expected to come with secret, closed and owner developments, but the Deepseek moment marked a turning point. Or two. The first, demonstrating that China was already at a very high level in AI. The second, by betting on an Open Source approach and invited the world to try Deepseek freely and learn from it.

Since then they have not stopped appearing from China that they presume to have greater performance than Deepseek R1 and that of course make it clear that in China there is an entire internal war to lead this segment. Qwen 2.5 Max (Alibaba), Doubou 1.5 Pro (Bytedance), Ernie 4.5 (Baidu), Hunyuan Turbo s (Tencent) or Kimi K1.5 (MoNshot AI) are some recent examples of that frantic movement, but again the really surprising thing is the open approach of many of these models.

And as they point out In Financial Times“business and geopolitics, Generosity rarely lacks strategy“That China is opening its AI models has its reason for being, and that is precisely to attract talent to strengthen its models and thus be able to win that career.

In China they are managing the US sanctions decentralizing their development and managing to capture the interest of developers around the world to study these models and improve them.

In fact, that overall opening of Chinese models suddenly makes vetoes to use Nvidia advanced chips are no longer so effective. It is true that in China they will not be able to use them, but Western countries with access to these chips can train and refine models based on Chinese Open Source models, which also serves as a way of avoiding sanctions. It is a “no matter that you do not let us train our models with the best Nvidia chips: others will do it outside China.”

The strategy seems to be working. The interest and popularity of Chinese models is growing, but it is also their quality and benefits is already at the level of the best closed openai, Anthropic or Google models. And if there are open models with the same performance as chatgpt or Claude or Gemini, but they are source and free, cheaper or cheaper, Why use payment alternatives? In many cases the answer will be overwhelming: not at all.

Of course, the Chinese bet has its risks. Foreign companies may end up taking advantage of Chinese advances to launch their own models that are superior or that fit other markets.

Perplexity, for example, has created R1 1776an Open Source version of Deepseek R1 that annuls censorship and biases imposed by some Chinese models – they don’t answer you if you ask about the events of Tiananmen’s Square. It is something that the Beijing government probably did not like it, but it was inevitable.

And despite this, China is achieving what it pursued. And the solution was not to close the world more, but, curiously, open to the Open Source philosophy.

Who would have said it.

In Xataka | Deepseek has become the Fashion company of the AI. Unlike the rest, he refuses to accept external investment