China’s focus on ‘diffusion’ and open-source may prove a better AI play than the U.S.’s drive for ‘perfection’

When DeepSeek released its buzzy AI model, developers celebrated its high-performance and low compute costs—and the Chinese research lab’s decision to release the model on an open-source basis, allowing anyone to download and tweak it for their own ends.

Chinese AI developers, large and small, have released a series of open-source AI models throughout 2025, impressing outside developers and showing that China is able to catch up in the race to develop this new technology.

Open-source models, particularly from China, now may be starting to edge out the proprietary models rolled out by U.S. firms like OpenAI. Even some U.S. businesses are starting to think about Chinese models: Last month, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said that his company had started to use Alibaba’s open-source Qwen model, wh