The Future of the Global Open-Source AI Ecosystem: From DeepSeek to AI+

This is the third and final blog in a three-part series on China's open source community's historical advancements since January 2025's "DeepSeek Moment." In this third article, we examine paths and trajectories of prominent Chinese AI organizations, and posit future directions for open source. For AI researchers and developers, open source is the dominant and popular approach for Chinese AI organizations for the near future. Openly sharing artifacts from models to papers to deployment infrastructure maps to a strategy with the goal of large-scale deployment and integration. Having examined strategic and architectural changes since DeepSeek's R1, we get a glimpse for the first time at how an organic open source AI ecosystem is taking shape in China. Alibaba positioned open source as an ecosystem and infrastructure strategy. By mid-2025, Qwen became the model with most derivatives on Hugging Face, with over 113k models using Qwen as a base. Tencent also made a significant move from borrowing to building, accelerating open releases in vision and 3D. ByteDance, following its "AI application factory" approach, selectively open sourced high value components like UI-TARS-1.5. Baidu also shifted its stance, re-entering the ecosystem through free access and open release of the Ernie 4.5 series. Among startups, Moonshot, Z.ai, and MiniMax adjusted rapidly, with Kimi K2's release being described as another "DeepSeek moment." This ecosystem is built on years of accumulated infrastructure, including the "East Data, West Compute" strategy, with China's total compute capacity reaching 1590 EFLOPS by 2025.