Why Chinese AI labs went open and will remain open

All across the internet there's speculation and confusion about why Chinese labs open source their models, and that they're going closed. Chinese labs will remain open, because the reason they went open to begin with is still valid. 

In late September of last year, Alibaba hosted their big AI conference, ApSara. I took a look at the main video on YouTube the day after. How many views did it have? I think it didn't break 50 views in 24 hours. The same video from OpenAI or Anthropic would have had at least 100k views and probably much more. 

Internet comments say that open sourcing is a national strategy, a loss maker subsidized by the government. On the contrary, it is a commercial strategy and the best strategy available in this industry. 

When it comes to building global businesses, China has two unicorns: DJI and Insta360. No, not Xiaomi, not Lenovo, not Tencent. ByteDance acquired TikTok (musical.ly, with 200M users) and their attempts at building TikTok Shop have been disasters so they don't make it into this list either.

DJI and Insta360 are unicorns because they don't just make the best products in their respective industries, by far, but are also the clear category leader in the minds of consumers and are the clear go to brands for anyone considering a drone or action camera. They are trusted to have the best products on the market, and the same cannot be said for the other brands I listed. 

DJI and Insta360 are successful in part because of clear technical and product vision, and in part because of focuses, professional marketing. That marketing in large part is video content on YouTube, on their owned channels and through influencers. YouTube is such an important marketing channel for any business, and especially Chinese businesses with no presence and few PR contacts abroad, because it gets them into the conversation. It is the beginning of trust-building because known personalities approve of the product.

This is how important YouTube is for Chinese brands:

Above I've talked about hardware products. What about language models? Being part of the conversation is just as important regardless of industry. When OpenAI's launch videos can get 100k+ views by default and Alibaba's get just a handful, it's clear that even a company like Alibaba has no pull outside of China. For MiniMax, Kimi, Z.ai, it is of course even harder. 

So what can they do to be part of the conversation? If Qwen could only be accessed through Alibaba Cloud APIs, why would anyone bother trying it out other than for novelty when they're already satisfied with their GPTs and Claudes?

Open sourcing models the answer. That's how these labs drive thousands of conversations across YouTube, reddit, X, and eventually get in the tech media and even mainstream media, despite having had no international marketing teams whatsoever back in 2023-2024. 

As a display of this importance there's even an account on Xiaohongshu tracking metrics like GLM's mentions on r/LocalLlama:

Open sourcing models is not a commercial risk because barely anyone can run them locally, few companies have the ability to manage and post-train their own models, and models lose relevance quickly. The real risk that exists is inference providers competing with the labs themselves, but that is being fixed with non-commercial licenses for models in 2026. 

There are additional benefits to open source. Even Google is open sourcing their smaller models, Gemma. The benefit is building affinity between end-users and on-device models, because the future of inference isn't local or cloud, it's hybrid local and cloud. Google would love to be the preference in both cases. 

We are also going to see proprietary open source models released in 2026, in the sense of models with their own memory systems and perhaps recursive capabilities. These have no standard, and every lab would prefer to be the one to define the new standards, like OpenAI and Anthropic have done with inference APIs.

Additionally, we'll also see fine-tuned and post-trained open models, sold by independent labs to both individual and corporate end users in 2026. These help set standards, too.

So in conclusion, there are many commercial benefits to open source, and as long as Chinese labs do not have strong international marketing and sales capabilities within their organizations they will keep open sourcing their models, because there is no other choice. Their business depends on giving models away for free, because open source is like PR, but real.