Chinese AI models are booming in Silicon Valley.

(CLO) AI models developed in China are rapidly spreading in Silicon Valley, becoming indispensable tools for many American companies.

The rise of developers like Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax shows that China is gaining a competitive advantage by offering “open” language models at a much lower cost than its American counterparts.

This trend also reflects the fact that, despite the US implementing advanced chip export controls to restrict China, Chinese technology companies are still rising strongly and gaining deep access to the global AI ecosystem.

In October, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said the company had chosen Alibaba's Qwen over OpenAI's ChatGPT because the model was "fast and inexpensive." Around the same time, Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya also revealed his company switched to Moonshot's Kimi K2 because of its "much higher performance and significantly lower cost" compared to OpenAI or Anthropic's models.

Illustration photo: VCG

On social media, many programmers have also pointed out that two popular American programming assistants – Composer and Windsurf – are actually built on Chinese models. While the companies that developed these tools have not confirmed this, Z.ai stated that the finding “is consistent with their internal data.”

Machine learning researcher Nathan Lambert, founder of the Atom Project in the US, commented: "China's open models have become the de facto standard in the American tech startup world." He added that many highly valued startups in the US are quietly training or deploying models like Qwen, Kimi, GLM, and DeepSeek, but avoid publicly acknowledging this.

According to the OpenRouter platform, seven of the top 20 most used AI models last week were developed in China, with four of them ranking among the top 10 most popular programming tools. Data from Hugging Face also shows that the total number of downloads of open-source models from China exceeded 540 million as of October.

Experts believe the Chinese model is particularly attractive to startups because of its low costs. Rui Ma, founder of Tech Buzz China, said: “These early-stage companies care more about costs than branding, and many of them are unlikely to survive for long.”

Unlike ChatGPT or Claude, Chinese models are typically open source, with publicly available training weights, allowing the community to customize and deploy them. However, large-scale operation still requires significant computing power, and Chinese developers are providing that service at a much lower cost.

Companies like Z.ai (Beijing) and DeepSeek (Hangzhou) say they primarily use older generation chips, which are not on the US export control list, thereby significantly reducing hardware costs and model training expenses.

Professor Toby Walsh (University of New South Wales) commented: “The success of Chinese AI models demonstrates the failure of US export control policies. Those restrictions only made Chinese companies more innovative, optimizing their models to be smaller and more efficient.”

According to a report by AllianceBernstein, the cost of using the DeepSeek model is up to 40 times cheaper than OpenAI.

Professor Greg Slabaugh (Queen Mary University of London) argues that the West has underestimated China's AI advances: "The emergence of open models only makes their technological power more easily accessible globally."

Some analysts compare China's AI strategy to how it once dominated the solar panel market – launching a low-cost, globally saturated product.

Nevertheless, experts believe that American companies still maintain an advantage in the high-end segment and in sectors subject to strict scrutiny, such as defense and data infrastructure.

Source: https://congluan.vn/mo-hinh-ai-trung-quoc-bung-no-o-thung-lung-silicon-10317666.html