Soaring Costs Prompt Fresh Interest in Open Source AI. Chinese Firms Are Way Ahead.

Can open-source beat OpenAI?

China aggressively releases open-source AI models (DeepSeek, Zhipu) while OpenAI and Anthropic maintain closed-source; Chinese reinforcement learning algorithms become default in U.S. research labs. For tech managers, sustainable open-source monetization via APIs and infrastructure weakens American vendor lock-in, forcing critical stack decisions.