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Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox.<\/span><\/p>\n China has overtaken the US in the global market for \u201copen\u201d artificial intelligence models, gaining a crucial edge over how the powerful technology is used around the world.\u00a0<\/p>\n A study by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and open-source AI start-up Hugging Face found that the total share of downloads of new Chinese-made open models rose to 17 per cent in the past year.<\/p>\n The figure surpasses the 15.8 per cent share of downloads from American developers such as Google, Meta and OpenAI \u2014 the first time Chinese groups have beaten their American counterparts.<\/p>\n Open models \u2014 which are free to download, modify and integrate by developers \u2014 make it easier for start-ups to create products and researchers to improve them. Widespread adoption will confer outsized influence over AI\u2019s future.<\/p>\n China\u2019s push to release open models comes in stark contrast to the \u201cclosed\u201d approach of most of the biggest US tech companies. By contrast, Chinese groups \u2014 which have been cut off from advanced AI chips made by Nvidia \u2014 have been encouraged by Beijing officials to offer wider access to their models.<\/p>\n \u201cIn China, open source has been sort of a more mainstream trend than in the US,\u201d said Wendy Chang, senior analyst at think-tank Mercator Institute for China Studies. \u201cUS companies have chosen not to play that way. They\u2019re making money on these high valuations. They don\u2019t want to open source their secrets.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Recommended<\/p>\n DeepSeek and Alibaba\u2019s Qwen models make up the vast majority of downloads of Chinese models, according to MIT and Hugging Face\u2019s data.\u00a0<\/p>\n DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley when it introduced its powerful AI reasoning model R1, which was on par with US competitors despite using a fraction of the cost and computing power.<\/p>\n The release raised questions about whether better resourced US AI labs could defend their competitive edge. It also raised doubts over the billions of dollars being spent to build the data centres needed to operate powerful models.<\/p>\n The Trump administration, which is anxious to win the AI race against China, has sought to convince US groups to invest in open-source models with \u201cAmerican values\u201d in its AI Action Plan. <\/p>\n In August, OpenAI introduced its first \u201copen weight\u201d models \u2014 which are free to access, but provide less comprehensive information than \u201copen source\u201d models that supply the code and training data required to train a model from scratch.<\/p>\n Meta, whose family of Llama models was the gold standard of open-weight AI development for years, has shifted its strategy by investing more into developing powerful closed models, as it races against the likes of OpenAI, Anthropic and Google to develop \u201csuperintelligence\u201d.\u00a0<\/p>\n Chinese companies such as DeepSeek and Alibaba Cloud have introduced a \u201cparadigm shifting\u201d way of releasing models, said Shayne Longpre, a researcher at MIT who was part of the study.<\/p>\n He said Chinese companies were shipping models on a weekly or biweekly basis, with many different variations that users can choose from, rather than releasing a series of models every six months or year like US labs.<\/p>\n Other experts said that while China might be restrained in computing power, thanks to US export controls on powerful chips, the country has a wealth of homegrown researchers.<\/p>\n This has allowed the country\u2019s AI groups to be more creative in their approach to model development, using techniques such as distillation to create smaller yet powerful models.\u00a0The country\u2019s AI labs have also leaned in heavily into developing AI video-generation models.<\/p>\n The popularity of Chinese open models is already influencing the information people receive. Researchers have shown that Chinese models have clear Chinese Communist party biases and ideologies, and generally decline to generate information on controversial topics such as Taiwan or the Tiananmen Square massacre.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, US labs are much more focused on progressing state-of-the-art \u201cfrontier\u201d models, with OpenAI and Google DeepMind aiming to build artificial general intelligence, or AI systems that exceed human capabilities.<\/p>\n The US has far fewer big independent players in open source development than China. Its most recent contribution has been by the Seattle-based Allen Institute for AI, which launched its Olmo 3, a fully open source model, in November.\u00a0<\/p>\n Janet Egan, senior fellow and deputy director at the Center for a New American Security, a think-tank, said: \u201cIt should be of concern to the US that China is making great strides in the open\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009model domain.\u201d<\/p>\n Additional reporting by Eleanor Olcott and Ryan McMorrow\u00a0in Beijing. Data visualisations by Martin Stabe<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Stay informed with free updates Simply sign up to the Artificial intelligence myFT Digest — delivered directly to your inbox. China has overtaken the US in the global market for \u201copen\u201d artificial intelligence models, gaining a crucial edge over how the powerful technology is used around the world.\u00a0 A study by the Massachusetts Institute of<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35277,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[49],"tags":[2153,1123,19899,306,4112,3866],"class_list":{"0":"post-35276","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-business","8":"tag-china","9":"tag-global","10":"tag-leapfrogs","11":"tag-market","12":"tag-models","13":"tag-open"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35276","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=35276"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/35276\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/35277"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=35276"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=35276"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=35276"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
<\/strong>OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have preferred to maintain full control of their most advanced technology, profiting from them through customer subscriptions or enterprise deals.<\/p>\n