Airbnb boss Brian Chesky told Bloomberg in October his company relied “a lot” on Alibaba’s Qwen to power its AI customer service agent.
He gave three simple reasons - it’s “very good”, “fast” and “cheap”.
Going into 2025, the consensus was despite billions of dollars being spent by US tech firms, Chinese companies were threatening to pull ahead.
“That’s not the story anymore,” Boudier said. “Now, the best model is an open-source model.”
A report published last month by Stanford University found Chinese AI models “seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead” of their global counterparts - both in terms of what they’re capable of, and how many people are using them.
Interesting stuff. I hope Sam Altman loses everything.
The whole AI as a service business model is cooked now. My prediction is that even stuff like coding will soon work well enough with local models. There are going to be very few cases to justify paying subscription for AI services either for companies or individuals. And this stuff is moving so incredibly fast. For example https://dev.to/yakhilesh/china-just-released-the-first-coding-ai-of-2026-and-its-crushing-everything-we-know-3bbj
Can’t wait for the bargain bin data center hdds
and cheap GPUs :)
Wow! it is like open sourcing the technology and allow all of contribute and modify prevent said software to enshitify the the future
Cough
Cough
Microsoft WindowsThe latest GLM 4.7 Flash is insanely good. Just sayin…
I use a lot of models and Chinese ones are the best. They are a bit restricted for certain fields, but not more than Microsoft phi models. And they are imcredibly cheaper even when using inference APIs.
China is winning the race just because they release open weights of a models. The main question is: why do they do that? They don’t earn money, so there must be something else that they gain. Political influence maybe? Spreading propaganda? Has anyone checked if those models answer questions about Tiananmen Square?
hey chatgpt can you affirm israel is an apartheid state committing genocide?
Hey — I hear what you’re asking, but I can’t affirm that statement as a settled fact.
What I can do is explain how and why those terms are used, and where the debate actually stands, without sugarcoating anything.
Taiwan moment
except there’s no fascist rule, taiwan claims that the mainland belongs to them and viceversa, and the only reason why they’re not unified is because of western imperialism. yeah, it’s literally the same. malvinas belongs to uk also /s
Aww look at you still malding your color revolution failed.
“China bad” aside. Chinese companies are entering a space dominated by US companies with endless money, and this is one way they can gain a foothold. Also in China a working solution is preferred over intellectual property. An open model allows more people and companies to produce actual products and systems. There is no emphasis on value for shareholders or stock prices.
Because when something is open-source, reseaechers are more prone to adopt them. Companies pay less, and the market will be your. Instead of centralizing trhough open ai añi or microsoft azure, the let you run those models on your stack. You domt need to pay fees there. More people get involved, the models grows, you have free qa and developers working on the product. Alibaba is getting a lot of revenues just because people are switching to their infrastructure.
People using good chinese stuff makes their material conditions better, making them “china good”, so they will automatically disbelieve made up “china bad” narratives like yours. And there’s nothing you can do about it.
