Re: open sourcing. My guess why they open source more is for verification purposes. Chinese labs have an earned reputation for scams. So a lab that announces a closed source chat site, to investors, could very well be a claude or openai or llama or gemini wrapper. However, a lab that releases the weights of their model, and “shows their work” by giving a detailed writeup of how they managed to train the model while staying under their reported costs is significantly more likely to be legitimate.
That applies to American companies too. When you are small and need investors, what matters is your impressiveness, not your profitability. But then later when you are spending a billion dollars on a training run and you are a mid-sized tech company, in order to continue impressing investors you need a serious path to profitability.
Re: open sourcing. My guess why they open source more is for verification purposes. Chinese labs have an earned reputation for scams. So a lab that announces a closed source chat site, to investors, could very well be a claude or openai or llama or gemini wrapper. However, a lab that releases the weights of their model, and “shows their work” by giving a detailed writeup of how they managed to train the model while staying under their reported costs is significantly more likely to be legitimate.
That applies to American companies too. When you are small and need investors, what matters is your impressiveness, not your profitability. But then later when you are spending a billion dollars on a training run and you are a mid-sized tech company, in order to continue impressing investors you need a serious path to profitability.
I agree, and we do see some american companies doing the same thing.