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Hindustan Times
2 days ago
- Business
- Hindustan Times
China's Lead in Open-Source AI Jolts Washington and Silicon Valley
China's ambition to turn its open-source artificial-intelligence models into a global standard has jolted American companies and policymakers, who fear U.S. models could be eclipsed and are mobilizing their responses to the threat. Chinese advances in AI have come one after another this year, starting with the widely heralded DeepSeek and its R1 reasoning model in January. This was followed by Alibaba's Qwen and a flurry of others since July, with names such as Moonshot, and MiniMax. The models all have versions that are free for users to download and modify. This approach, commonly referred to as open source or open weight, is driving global adoption of Chinese AI technology. American companies that have kept their models proprietary are feeling the pressure. In early August, ChatGPT maker OpenAI released its first open-source model, called gpt-oss. The history of technology offers many examples where a welter of competitors in an industry's infancy eventually evolved into a monopoly or oligopoly of a few players. Microsoft's Windows operating system for desktops, Google's search engine, and the iOS and Android operating systems for smartphones are just a few of the examples. History also teaches that the battle to become an industry standard isn't necessarily won by the most technologically advanced player. Easy availability and flexibility play a role, which is why China's advances in open-source AI worry many in Washington and Silicon Valley. In an AI action plan released in July, the Trump administration said open-source models 'could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research.' The report called on the U.S. to build 'leading open models founded on American values.' President Trump displayed a signed executive order related to his Artificial Intelligence Action Plan last month. For now, the rewards to the winners in open-source AI are slim, since they spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing models and get paid nothing directly in return. But those who lock in users may be able to sell other services piggybacking on the free part, just as Google offers search, YouTube and other revenue-generating products bundled with its Android operating system. Android is itself open source and built on Linux, an open-source operating system still widely used in the industry. Researchers have long embraced open source as a way of accelerating the development of emerging technology, since it allows every user to see the code and suggest improvements. Chinese officials have encouraged open-source research and development not only in AI but also in operating systems, semiconductor architecture and engineering software. 'Fearing being cut off from American technologies, China is fostering open-source projects as a strategic fallback and emergency resource,' said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at research firm Omdia focusing on AI. This year's U.S.-China trade war has shown how each side can leverage its industrial advantages—such as Nvidia chips for the U.S. and rare-earth minerals for China—to extract concessions from the other side. U.S. officials worry that if Chinese AI models dominate the globe, Beijing will figure out a way to exploit it for geopolitical advantage. Away from politics, open-source AI models are vying for adoption by businesses. Many customers like open-source AI because they can freely adapt it and put it on their computer systems, keeping sensitive information in-house. Singapore-based Oversea-Chinese Banking, one of Southeast Asia's biggest banks, has developed around 30 internal tools using open-source models, including Google's Gemma to summarize documents, Qwen to help write computer code and DeepSeek to analyze market trends. The bank said it avoided being locked into any one model. It monitors new releases and can switch if it likes a new model. It also prefers models that many developers are familiar with, so it can get technical support. 'At any point in time, we probably have a stable of about 10 open-source models that we're using,' said Donald MacDonald, an executive at OCBC. The overall performance of China's best open-weight model has surpassed the American open-source champion since November, according to research firm Artificial Analysis. The firm, which rates the ability of models in math, coding and other areas, found a version of Alibaba's Qwen3 beat OpenAI's gpt-oss. However, the Chinese model is almost twice as big as OpenAI's, suggesting that for simpler tasks, Qwen might consume more computing power to do the same job. OpenAI said its open-source model outperformed rivals of similar size on reasoning tasks and delivered strong performance at low cost. Major U.S. cloud-service providers have started offering gpt-oss to their users. Amazon Web Services said the OpenAI model was more cost-effective than DeepSeek's R1 running on its infrastructure. Engineers, especially those in Asia, said they found Chinese models were often more sophisticated in understanding their local languages and catching cultural nuances. Models from China are trained with more data in Chinese, which shares similarities with some other Asian languages. Shinichi Usami, an engineer in Yokohama, Japan, recently developed a customer-service chatbot for a retail client. He chose Alibaba's Qwen. With a leading U.S. model, he said, 'we've observed instances where the chatbot struggles to grasp the implicit intent from users' words and the responses can occasionally be not polite enough,' said Usami. 'Qwen appears to handle these nuances better.' Companies in China's hypercompetitive AI industry at first focused on undercutting each other's prices for closed-source models. That competition has extended in recent months to open-source models as everyone fights for adoption and public recognition. 'Chinese companies often prioritize user stickiness over immediate revenue,' said Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based tech analyst at 86Research. While startups have a window to attract users, it won't last long, analysts said, and larger tech companies are often best-positioned to cash in on a big user base by offering related services such as specialized apps or cloud services. 'This Darwinian life-or-death struggle will lead to the demise of many of the existing players, but the intense competition breeds strong companies,' wrote Andrew Ng, head of Silicon Valley startup in a recent blog. Write to Raffaele Huang at
Mint
4 days ago
- Business
- Mint
China's lead in open-source AI jolts Washington and Silicon Valley
China's ambition to turn its open-source artificial-intelligence models into a global standard has jolted American companies and policymakers, who fear U.S. models could be eclipsed and are mobilizing their responses to the threat. Chinese advances in AI have come one after another this year, starting with the widely heralded DeepSeek and its R1 reasoning model in January. This was followed by Alibaba's Qwen and a flurry of others since July, with names such as Moonshot, and MiniMax. The models all have versions that are free for users to download and modify. This approach, commonly referred to as open source or open weight, is driving global adoption of Chinese AI technology. American companies that have kept their models proprietary are feeling the pressure. In early August, ChatGPT maker OpenAI released its first open-source model, called gpt-oss. The history of technology offers many examples where a welter of competitors in an industry's infancy eventually evolved into a monopoly or oligopoly of a few players. Microsoft's Windows operating system for desktops, Google's search engine, and the iOS and Android operating systems for smartphones are just a few of the examples. History also teaches that the battle to become an industry standard isn't necessarily won by the most technologically advanced player. Easy availability and flexibility play a role, which is why China's advances in open-source AI worry many in Washington and Silicon Valley. In an AI action plan released in July, the Trump administration said open-source models 'could become global standards in some areas of business and in academic research." The report called on the U.S. to build 'leading open models founded on American values." President Trump displayed a signed executive order related to his Artificial Intelligence Action Plan last month. For now, the rewards to the winners in open-source AI are slim, since they spend hundreds of millions of dollars developing models and get paid nothing directly in return. But those who lock in users may be able to sell other services piggybacking on the free part, just as Google offers search, YouTube and other revenue-generating products bundled with its Android operating system. Android is itself open source and built on Linux, an open-source operating system still widely used in the industry. Researchers have long embraced open source as a way of accelerating the development of emerging technology, since it allows every user to see the code and suggest improvements. Chinese officials have encouraged open-source research and development not only in AI but also in operating systems, semiconductor architecture and engineering software. 'Fearing being cut off from American technologies, China is fostering open-source projects as a strategic fallback and emergency resource," said Lian Jye Su, an analyst at research firm Omdia focusing on AI. This year's U.S.-China trade war has shown how each side can leverage its industrial advantages—such as Nvidia chips for the U.S. and rare-earth minerals for China—to extract concessions from the other side. U.S. officials worry that if Chinese AI models dominate the globe, Beijing will figure out a way to exploit it for geopolitical advantage. Away from politics, open-source AI models are vying for adoption by businesses. Many customers like open-source AI because they can freely adapt it and put it on their computer systems, keeping sensitive information in-house. Singapore-based Oversea-Chinese Banking, one of Southeast Asia's biggest banks, has developed around 30 internal tools using open-source models, including Google's Gemma to summarize documents, Qwen to help write computer code and DeepSeek to analyze market trends. The bank said it avoided being locked into any one model. It monitors new releases and can switch if it likes a new model. It also prefers models that many developers are familiar with, so it can get technical support. 'At any point in time, we probably have a stable of about 10 open-source models that we're using," said Donald MacDonald, an executive at OCBC. The overall performance of China's best open-weight model has surpassed the American open-source champion since November, according to research firm Artificial Analysis. The firm, which rates the ability of models in math, coding and other areas, found a version of Alibaba's Qwen3 beat OpenAI's gpt-oss. However, the Chinese model is almost twice as big as OpenAI's, suggesting that for simpler tasks, Qwen might consume more computing power to do the same job. OpenAI said its open-source model outperformed rivals of similar size on reasoning tasks and delivered strong performance at low cost. Major U.S. cloud-service providers have started offering gpt-oss to their users. Amazon Web Services said the OpenAI model was more cost-effective than DeepSeek's R1 running on its infrastructure. Engineers, especially those in Asia, said they found Chinese models were often more sophisticated in understanding their local languages and catching cultural nuances. Models from China are trained with more data in Chinese, which shares similarities with some other Asian languages. Shinichi Usami, an engineer in Yokohama, Japan, recently developed a customer-service chatbot for a retail client. He chose Alibaba's Qwen. With a leading U.S. model, he said, 'we've observed instances where the chatbot struggles to grasp the implicit intent from users' words and the responses can occasionally be not polite enough," said Usami. 'Qwen appears to handle these nuances better." Companies in China's hypercompetitive AI industry at first focused on undercutting each other's prices for closed-source models. That competition has extended in recent months to open-source models as everyone fights for adoption and public recognition. 'Chinese companies often prioritize user stickiness over immediate revenue," said Charlie Chai, a Shanghai-based tech analyst at 86Research. While startups have a window to attract users, it won't last long, analysts said, and larger tech companies are often best-positioned to cash in on a big user base by offering related services such as specialized apps or cloud services. 'This Darwinian life-or-death struggle will lead to the demise of many of the existing players, but the intense competition breeds strong companies," wrote Andrew Ng, head of Silicon Valley startup in a recent blog. Write to Raffaele Huang at
CNBC
01-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
China's Huawei open-sources AI models as it seeks adoption across the global AI market
Huawei has open-sourced its artificial intelligence models — a move tech experts say will help the U.S.-blacklisted firm continue to build its AI ecosystem and expand overseas. The Chinese tech giant announced on Monday the open-sourcing of two of its AI models under its Pangu series, as well as some of its model reasoning technology. The moves are in line with other Chinese AI players that continue to push an open-source development strategy. Baidu also open-sourced its large language model series Ernie on Monday. Tech experts told CNBC that Huawei's latest announcements not only highlight how it is solidifying itself as an open-source LLM player, but also how it is strengthening its position across the entire AI value chain as it works to overcome U.S.-led AI chip export restrictions. In recent years, the company has transformed from a competent private sector telecommunications firm into a "muscular technology juggernaut straddling the entire AI hardware and software stack," said Paul Triolo, partner and senior vice president for China at advisory firm DGA-Albright Stonebridge Group. In its announcement Monday, Huawei called the open-source moves another key measure for Huawei's "Ascend ecosystem strategy" that would help speed up the adoption of AI across "thousands of industries." The Ascend ecosystem refers to AI products built around the company's Ascend AI chip series, which are widely considered to be China's leading competitor to products from American chip giant Nvidia. Nvidia is restricted from selling its advanced products to China. Pangu being available in an open-source manner allows developers and businesses to test the models and customize them for their needs, said Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia. "The move is expected to incentivize the use of other Huawei products," he added. According to experts, the coupling of Huawei's Pangu models with the company's AI chips and related products gives the company a unique advantage, allowing it to optimize its AI solutions and applications. While competitors like Baidu have LLMs with broad capabilities, Huawei has focused on specialized AI models for sectors such as government, finance and manufacturing. "Huawei is not as strong as companies like DeepSeek and Baidu at the overall software level – but it doesn't need to be," said Marc Einstein, research director at Counterpoint Research. "Its objective is to ultimately use open source products to drive hardware sales, which is a completely different model from others. It also collaborates with DeepSeek, Baidu and others and will continue to do so," he added. Ray Wang, principal analyst at Constellation Research, said the chip-to-model strategy is similar to that of Google, a company that is also developing AI chips and AI models like its open-source Gemma models. Huawei's announcement on Monday could also help with its international ambitions. Huawei, along with players like Zhipu AI, has been slowly making inroads into new overseas markets. In its announcement Monday, Huawei invited developers, corporate partners and researchers around the world to download and use its new open-source products in order to gather feedback and improve them. "Huawei's open-source strategy will resonate well in developing countries where enterprises are more price-sensitive as is the case with [Huawei's] other products," Einstein said. As part of its global strategy, the company has also been looking to bring its latest AI data center solutions to new countries.
CNBC
01-07-2025
- Business
- CNBC
AI companies see open source as a strategic advantage: Analyst
Lian Jye Su, chief analyst at Omdia, talks about the rush to go open source among Chinese AI companies, especially on the back of Deepseek's success, and how that positions them in the global AI race with the US.
Hans India
30-06-2025
- Business
- Hans India
Baidu to Open Source ERNIE AI Model, Shaking Up Global AI Arena
In a bold and unexpected move, Chinese tech giant Baidu has announced the open-sourcing of its flagship ERNIE generative AI model, marking a pivotal moment in the rapidly evolving global AI competition. The company confirmed that the rollout would begin gradually starting Monday. While not as abrupt or headline-grabbing as the recent debut of DeepSeek, Baidu's decision is already making waves in the AI community and prompting responses from key industry stakeholders worldwide. The development comes as a surprise, given Baidu's long-held stance favouring proprietary development. The company has traditionally maintained strict control over its AI tools and infrastructure, resisting the open-source wave that has swept through parts of the tech world. 'Baidu has always been very supportive of its proprietary business model and was vocal against open-source, but disruptors like DeepSeek have proven that open-source models can be as competitive and reliable as proprietary ones,' said Lian Jye Su, Chief Analyst at technology research firm Omdia, speaking to CNBC earlier. Although the move might not have the dramatic impact DeepSeek generated, experts are calling it an important step in AI's broader evolution. 'This isn't just a China story. Every time a major lab open-sources a powerful model, it raises the bar for the entire industry,' said Sean Ren, Associate Professor of Computer Science at the University of Southern California and Samsung's AI Researcher of the Year. Ren pointed out that open-source models challenge industry norms, especially for closed-source providers like OpenAI and Anthropic. 'While most consumers don't care whether a model's code is open-sourced, they do care about lower costs, better performance, and support for their language or region. Those benefits often come from open models, which give developers and researchers more freedom to iterate, customize, and deploy faster,' he explained. From a pricing standpoint, industry analysts see Baidu's move as a potential game-changer. Alec Strasmore, founder of AI advisory Epic Loot, compared the shift to a price war. 'Baidu just threw a Molotov into the AI world,' he declared. 'OpenAI, Anthropic, DeepSeek — all these guys who thought they were selling top-notch champagne are about to realise that Baidu will be giving away something just as powerful.' He continued, 'This isn't a competition; it's a declaration of war on pricing.' According to Strasmore, startups and smaller developers may soon rethink paying premium prices for AI access. This new strategy isn't entirely unanticipated. Earlier in March, Baidu claimed that its latest model, ERNIE X1, could match DeepSeek's R1 in performance while costing half as much. CEO Robin Li also hinted at the company's global ambitions during an April developer event. 'Our releases aim to empower developers to build the best applications — without having to worry about model capability, costs, or development tools,' Li said at the time. However, not all experts believe Baidu's open-source shift will immediately shake the Western market. Cliff Jurkiewicz, VP of Global Strategy at applied AI firm Phenom, suggested the news might not even register in the U.S. tech scene. 'The news of Baidu going open source probably lands with a big thud,' he commented. 'Most people in the United States don't even know it's a Chinese tech company.' Drawing parallels with the early Android ecosystem, Jurkiewicz explained that while open systems provide flexibility, they can also be challenging to manage. 'When Android first emerged, its standout feature was that it was configurable and customisable. But it was almost too much work… Android, out of the box, is plain and vanilla, so it has to be customised, and that's a real challenge,' he noted. As Baidu begins its rollout, all eyes are now on how this strategic pivot will reshape the global AI landscape — from affordability and accessibility to the core philosophies of AI development.
