Chinese Open Source AI Targets US Enterprise Market

This is both bad and good.

Bad - makes us more reliant on Chinese AI, which will inevitably make us dependent on Chinese chips.

Good - they are great, efficient, and cheap models that will put competitive pressure on US AI labs

@MatthewBerman Good. Competition will keep them in check.

The big open questions: Is there another shoe to drop? Will the US government try to ban open source models especially Chinese? Will they penalize companies that use them? That’s where my current fear lies. We’re moving into the next phase of open and enterprise sovereign pre-trained model adoption which is so exciting but what if there’s new roadblocks? What then? Maybe I’m worrying for nothing. I hope they is the case.

@MatthewBerman They can try. I can tell you right now every company I meet with asks me not to use Chinese models.

@designcoursecom yeah, competition is good

@MatthewBerman How sway?

@MatthewBerman Yup, China’s play is to open source the intelligence layer (to commoditize it) then win on the hardware that runs it (Huawei Ascend, rare earths, the full supply chain)

If the model is free, then the moat is the silicon. It’s a smart play. And nobody can out-supply-chain China.

@MatthewBerman I posted this pov like months ago :) so I agree 100%, the pattern became clear to me since the last DeepSeek version came out, but GLM 5.2 just made it crystal clear. I fear the stock market will freak out once they see this. Next issue: distillation is NOT theft.

@MatthewBerman What do you think will happen once AI companies go public?

Won't they succumb to the pressure of being profit making? Won't they move to token based pricing, becoming even more expensive?

It may just be better for most users to go Local.

@MatthewBerman good

@MatthewBerman @samhogan Spreadsheets are the only basic business usecase I can think of that really do need frontier models at the moment - and even that will change soon.

@communicating @samhogan you think the govt will ban open models?

@MatthewBerman Open source doesn't have borders. Enterprise buys what works at the price that works. Where it came from doesn't matter.

@MatthewBerman W take, great points

@MatthewBerman Also good: it will force US gov and frontier labs to improve their current stance