alt Hacker News> The reason they release the AI models is economic warfare against US
The story is so much more complicated than that, to the point that this economic warfare theory is basically a meme.
Chinese models are open because they don’t have a choice. “When you trail the frontier, openness maximizes reputation per unit of capability. The moment you lead, you close.” [0]
[0] https://earnedintuition.substack.com/p/involution-without-ex...
They do have a choice, as evidenced by all the times when the other option gets picked. The article you link tries to acknowledge ByteDance's Doubao and Alibaba's Qwen Max as exceptions, but forgets about Baidu's Ernie and iFlytek's Spark, which are also closed-weight. There's simply no consensus yet on which strategy is better, so different companies end up making different bets.