I disagree. I think deepseek, qwen, and kimi earn a lot of trust open sourcing their models. While still profiting.

Effectively they are saying "yea don't crowd our data centers with small queries, go ahead and send your frontier questions to our frontier models. Oh btw those us models? You can run something about as good for free from us if you want hah." It's a power and marketing move. It's also insanely smart to keep up with it to remain sustainable as a brand. Especially given how small their investments into this are.

Look at anthropics growing pains. Deepseek has other hosts spreading their brand for free while they grow. Brilliant honestly. In my opinion it makes anthropic and openai look clueless on a lot of levels.

China is playing a different game here. To them this is commoditizing their compliment and building good will. The Chinese economy doesn't teter on the brink of collapse to deliver frontier grade LLMs. Nope, Alibaba just made qwen because it needs it. It needs efficient models. Similarly, in China they manufacture and automate so much more than the US ever could. LLMs to them are a topping not the whole meal like they are in the us.