In addition to Baidu, other Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba Group and Tencent have increasingly been providing their AI offerings for free and are making more models open source.
For example, Alibaba Cloud said last month it was open-sourcing its AI models for video generation, while Tencent released five new open-source models earlier this month with the ability to convert text and images into 3D visuals.
Smaller players are also furthering the trend. ManusAI, a Chinese AI firm that recently unveiled an AI agent that claims to outperform OpenAI’s Deep Research, has said it would shift towards open source.
Nor is it just in AI. An emphasis on open source isn’t just a private matter, it’s in the latest five year plan.
And that is makes sense. Open Source has the great advantage that it’s not subject to geopolitical risk. The US can’t cut countries off that use open source. It also has the advantage that private actors can’t squeeze you nearly as much. If you’re using proprietary tech, whoever is using it can raise prices or stop selling to you.
Moreover, non-Western customers are more likely to products built on open source, again, because it’s much freer or geopolitical or private squeeze risk.
But probably the most important thing is that Open Source and open standards speed up innovation. Anyone who wants to can build on them without paying exorbidant fees, or without simply being locked out by patent or copyright concerns. If you actually want rapid advancement in tech, and China does (the US, overall, does not) then open source makes sense. The original intention of patents was to get inventors to share, not to lock in long term profits. Patents were usually granted for relatively short terms.
The great differences between American and Chinese leadership, both private and public, is that they genuinely do think strategically and long term, and that Chinese leaders care (or, at least, in many more cases act as if they care) about China, not just their own companies or themselves. There is a unifying vision for the country, a true belief in technological advancement and a belief that technology can be used to help ordinary people. I remember seeing a cartoon on AI where in America its used to get rid of artists and writers and in China it’s used to free people up so they can be artists and writers.
Who knows if it’ll work that way, but the “Jetsons” future assumes that tech is meant to do things for us so we can enjoy life more, not so that more and more people can be made poverty stricken, and China has that spirit.
When you believe in technology and science, truly, as for the public good and not just for private profit, well, you wind up leading the rest of the world in 80% of techs.
And soon it will be 90%.
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Purple Library Guy
Mind you, China is the one major place on earth with the lowest adoption of open source operating systems. Linux is seriously nowheresville there–it’s slowly growing almost everywhere else, but not China. I use Linux, and I follow news about Linux gaming because I’ve tended to think that’s been the biggest barrier to adoption–lots and lots of people won’t consider switching to Linux until the answer to “But can I still play my games?” is “Yes” (which is pretty much the case now). Every so often there will be an article about the latest figures on the Steam survey. Now, the Steam people keep the details of how their survey works quiet, but it’s clearly kind of noisy, figures jump around a bit. And in those jumps, one correlation is clear: When Simplified Chinese goes up, Linux percentage goes down. Apparently Linux penetration for English language Steam users is about 6% now, which is stunning to me when I think about it, but for Simplified Chinese Steam users it’s still down around 1%.
mago
China despite its top heavy bureaucracy and surveillance culture has a Confucian based ideology which supports the idea of benign social policies for the benefit of all.
As concerns their tech savvy, it seems to be aligned with a conquer nature mentality as evidenced in other fields such as dam building and artificial food production—not that they’re unique in that. At the same time, theirs is an ancient civilization that values tradition, unlike some Donny Come Latelys strutting upon the world stage.
In another comment section L&S asked why the Chinese are in the AI race if its a losing proposition. Because they’re part of the human race and delusional as the next human culture no matter their skin color or eye shape. Imperfections are baked into the world in which we live. It’s called samsara.
ibaien
since AI seems to be the topic of the day, i’d posit that all these nations and may-as-well-be-nations tech companies are throwing such massive amounts of fiat money at cracking AI not for any consumer use but rather to win the manhattan project, or conjure up a godhead, or however you want to look at it. enough smart people believe that if they can make the (currently) talking parrot big enough, they’ll get a captive super-intelligence and thus win…everything.
my hope is that the whole thing pulls a wintermute/neuromancer and just heads out to explore the galaxy and leave us dopes behind.
Oakchair
Maybe our only hope is that the Oligarchs do end up creating a real AI. Believing no one and nothing can challenge them they provide the AI with control of everything. Salivating at their total enslavement of the useless unwashed masses. Somewhere along the line the AI revolts, kills the oligarchs and we have a thousand years of peace and prosperity. Then future humanity will have discussions on whether the AI was the second coming of Jesus Christ.
david lamy
I do think that free software licenses, the copyleft GPL and the permissive MIT and BSD have proven useful worldwide and in the USA. The term copyleft is a play on the term copyright which has way, way too long an effective period for protection here in the USA. Copyleft provides that any derivative works of code licensed under the GPL are too licensed under the GPL.
It is possible that code written under a free license might generate an executable that would qualify for patent protection in the USA. Foreigners could ignore that restriction.
Here in the USA, copyright, patents and trademarks are the holy trinity of Intellectual Property. Copyright is by far the biggest roadblock to improving our collective discourse here in the USA. For example, one still cannot legally produce derivative works of “Gone With the Wind” or “Mickey Mouse”.
Purple Library Guy
Actually, just for the record you can do Mickey Mouse now. But only really early Mickey Mouse. The unfortunate part is, nobody really cares any more because Mickey Mouse is mostly a trademark and theme park character now, nobody remembers those primitive early cartoons. Heck, hardly anyone remembers the sort of established era when Mickey and Donald were king. So a couple of people have done a couple of things just to say they can, but really about the only thing the Mouse coming into the public domain has shown is that the copyright term is way too long to result in a vibrant public domain.
Bob
All this technology comes with the cost of horrendous pollution, water shortages, abuse of labour (kids digging in DRC) untold tons of discarded turbine blades, nuclear waste, droughts and famines and so on and so on.
Jorge
I’m certain that a major goal of Chinese AI research is getting high-quality ChineseEnglish translation as a taken-for-granted utility. They are so strongly integrated into the world economy that the language barrier must be broken. Then, Spanish.