> backed by the Chinese state

as opposed to the current crop being backed by the US state? The ones that are basically crying foul at competition? The ones that unilaterally tries to dictate based on political friendliness and compliance (ala, anthropic getting banned)?

At least with open models, you can own the hardware and do the end to end. The current bottleneck is hardware availability at low cost, but i am guessing the chinese state is looking to build their own chip supply chains. I suspect they will succeed.

They've consistently open-sourced their secret sauce since the beginning: https://github.com/orgs/deepseek-ai/repositories?type=all

I don't understand why this is strange to you, some people just do things out of personal satisfaction and/or building their legacy. If it's just money, Deepseek founders are already rich because they have a hedge fund company (High-flyer).

I believe majority of the AI inference (and probably training) infrastructure runs on Linux, so I'd certainly consider it a major player in the AI race.

Perhaps this is evidence there's not as much Fu Manchu moustache twirling scheming as it seemed?

It's releasing open source code. This is a good thing for the world, even if it impacts the portfolio of US VCs.