DeepSeek’s breakout moment wasn’t China’s first open-source success. Alibaba’s Qwen Lab had been releasing open-weight models for years. By September 2024, well before DeepSeek’s V3 launch, Alibaba was saying that global downloads had exceeded 600 million. On Hugging Face, Qwen accounted for greater than 30% of all model downloads in 2024. Other institutions, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and the AI firm Baichuan, were also releasing open models as early as 2023.
But because the success of DeepSeek, the sector has widened rapidly. Firms comparable to Z.ai (formerly Zhipu), MiniMax, Tencent, and a growing variety of smaller labs have released models which are competitive on reasoning, coding, and agent-style tasks. The growing variety of capable models has sped up progress. Capabilities that when took months to make it to the open-source world now emerge inside weeks, even days.
“Chinese AI firms have seen real gains from the open-source playbook,” says Liu Zhiyuan, a professor of computer science at Tsinghua University and chief scientist on the AI startup ModelBest. “By releasing strong research, they construct popularity and gain free publicity.”
Beyond industrial incentives, Liu says, open source has taken on cultural and strategic weight. “Within the Chinese programmer community, open source has change into politically correct,” he says, framing it as a response to US.dominance in proprietary AI systems.
That shift can also be reflected on the institutional level. Universities including Tsinghua have begun encouraging AI development and open-source contributions, while policymakers have moved to formalize those incentives. In August, China’s State Council released a draft policy encouraging universities to reward open-source work, proposing that students’ contributions on platforms comparable to GitHub or Gitee could eventually be counted toward academic credit.
With growing momentum and a reinforcing feedback loop, China’s push for open-source models is prone to proceed within the near term, though its long-term sustainability still hinges on financial results, says Tiezhen Wang, who helps lead work on global AI at Hugging Face. In January, the model labs Z.ai and MiniMax went public in Hong Kong. “Right away, the main target is on making the cake larger,” says Wang. “The subsequent challenge is determining how each company secures its share.”
The subsequent wave of models will probably be narrower—and higher
Chinese open-source models are leading not only in download volume but additionally in variety. Alibaba’s Qwen has change into one of the diversified open model families in circulation, offering a wide selection of variants optimized for various uses. The lineup ranges from lightweight models that may run on a single laptop to large, multi-hundred-billion-parameter systems designed for data-center deployment. Qwen features many task-optimized variants created by the community: the “instruct” models are good at following orders, and “code” variants focus on coding.
Although this strategy isn’t unique to Chinese labs, Qwen was the primary open model family to roll out so many high-quality options that it began to feel like a full product line—one which’s free to make use of.
