The soft power of making the best LLMs
this post was submitted on 02 Jul 2025
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This open accessibility is key to success. All the major Chinese companies are now making their models publicly available, transforming them into a substrate to build on top of. Conversely, US companies persist with a proprietary, subscription-service oriented business model virtually guaranteeing that Chinese models will become the global standard going forward. Any advantages proprietary models currently possess are fleeting as their tricks are quickly deciphered, while open-source alternatives benefit from continuous global contributions. It's the same dynamic Microsoft faced when it attempted to quash open-source in the early 2000s. A proprietary approach leads to zero-sum game dynamics, whereas an open approach creates a positive-sum environment. Ultimately, no single company can compete with the power of global collaboration.
Eh, a lot of American models are open too. Meta's llama and Microsofts phi for example. But if a chinese company can make a better model and release it for free, then why use anything else?
There are some, but most are closed and especially top end ones like Claude, ChatGPT, and Gemini. Meanwhile, Chinese companies are now increasingly releasing their top end models with no strings attached.
idk about the Chinese companies but in the case of facebook it's a pretty naked case of commoditizing their complements, not some altruistic play at positive-sum technobloomerism
the cheaper slop generation gets the better it is for facebook, the slop platform. it's weird that google hasn't made the same decision
There doesn't need to be any altruistic intent here. Facebook released their models because they fell behind OpenAI, and they realized that they could compete in selling them as a service. So, they pivoted to treating models like a commodity as you note. It still leads to a positive-sum cooperation scenario however regardless of the underlying intent.
Fundamentally, there's a competition between two business models here. Google, Anthropic, and OpenAI think they can stay far enough ahead with their proprietary models that they can continue to sell them as subscription services. Meanwhile, other companies don't see models as a direct source of revenue, and see them as a tool building platform.
I'm told by a friend that Bytedance is the leader right now, Baidu is about a year behind them.