Why Are We Sleeping on China’s AI Invasion?

When Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky recently admitted his company is “relying a lot” on Chinese AI models because they’re “very good…fast and cheap,” it should have set off alarm bells in Washington. Here’s a CEO choosing Alibaba’s Qwen over his friend Sam Altman’s OpenAI—not because of superior technology, but because Chinese AI is dramatically cheaper .

According to Bloomberg columnist Catherine Thorbecke, Alibaba’s Qwen has racked up roughly 385 million cumulative downloads on Hugging Face, surpassing Meta’s Llama at 346 million. Chinese AI models now account for more than 40 percent of new language models being built, while Meta’s share has collapsed to around 15 percent. Thorbecke also reports that U.S. coding startups valued at $10 billi

See Full Page