Last year, downloads of China-made models among newly created AI models on Hugging Face, an artificial intelligence (AI) model platform, surpassed those of U.S. models. In January last year, China AI startup DeepSeek shook the global market by delivering top-tier AI at low cost, and China has since been building its own AI ecosystem using open source as a weapon.
On the 8th, according to industry sources, Hugging Face posted a three-part report titled "One year after the DeepSeek moment."
DeepSeek led the spread of open source. After DeepSeek, China's big tech corporations switched to open source one after another. For example, China IT corporations Baidu had never released AI models as open source, but in the year since DeepSeek's launch it released more than 100 models on Hugging Face as open source. China AI corporations Moonshot also released Kimi K2.
According to a research report jointly released late last year by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Hugging Face, China leads the share of open-source downloads for AI models at 17.1%, ahead of the United States at 15.8%.
China's open-source AI models also lead U.S. models in the number of derivative models based on AI models. AI models derived from Alibaba corporations' Qwen model number 115,000. That outpaces Google at 72,000, Meta at 46,000, and OpenAI at 11,000.
In Silicon Valley in the United States, Chinese models are also exerting influence. According to the report, 80% of U.S. AI startups use Chinese open-source models in their product development process.
The report said, "While OpenAI and Anthropic stuck to closed ecosystems, Chinese corporations released high-performance models as open source, making China's open-source ecosystem the global standard."