some thoughts on chinese open source 1) i think that we should expect the chinese government to continue to allow chinese companies to open source their models 2) china's models are still behind the frontier and its rivals that could benefit from these models already have access to equivalent us models 3) the chinese government doesn't have to worry as much about internal issues; the government has a lot of tools to address employment, crime, fraud, etc... 4) the release of open weights models and open source research helps chinese academia participate and helps build china's frontier researcher pipeline 5) the chinese government doesn't need labs to be funded in a capitalist fashion, although it prefers it; the chinese government will support ai companies 6) the more interesting question is why chinese labs open source their models; the answer is that it helps them achieve national champion status 7) the new chinese ai labs like minimax, moonshot, zhipu and deepseek would like state support; low cost loans from state banks, access to chips, partnerships 8) so, they open source their models to demonstrate their value to chinese research capabilities, to china's technological capabilities in a way that is unambiguous 9) note that more established companies in china like bytedance do not open source their models; and, alibaba has stopped open sourcing its frontier models 10) these companies already have state support; they already have large businesses; they are more concerned with their competitors being able to use their research