Topics / Open Models
Open Models
Open weights have become China’s distribution strategy. When a lab cannot out-spend the frontier on chips, it can still set the standard by making its stack the cheapest and most legal one to run anywhere. From DeepSeek V4 to a trillion-parameter model out of a food-delivery company, the open releases keep landing on domestic silicon.
The state of play
- DeepSeek open-sourced V4 under the MIT license in April 2026, with Huawei Ascend 950 as a primary deployment path.
- In May 2026 a research team completed what it says is the first third-party full-parameter post-training of a 1.6-trillion-parameter model on about 1,000 Huawei Ascend cards, with no instability.
- The bet: when a lab cannot out-spend the frontier on chips, open weights make its stack the cheapest and most legal one to run anywhere.
Best issues on this topic
- The Trade-Down
An IDC survey found 47 percent of large US firms now run a Chinese model in at least one use case, and at one point mid-July all five top models on OpenRouter were Chinese. Coinbase, DoorDash, Airbnb and Cursor are named adopters, switching to cut the bill as UBS puts Chinese API prices at 10 to 20 percent of the US alternative.
- The Giveaway
DeepSeek open-sourced an 85% inference speedup. OpenAI found the same trick the same fortnight and kept it secret. One bets on standards, the other on margin.
- The Week the Race Happened
DeepSeek open-sourced V4 under MIT with Huawei Ascend as a primary deployment path: 1.6 trillion parameters, million-token context, coding a hair behind the best Western models. The first sovereign stack.
- Closed in Code
A team completed what it says is the first third-party full-parameter post-training of a 1.6-trillion-parameter model on about 1,000 Huawei Ascend cards, with no instability. The penalty is efficiency, and it is shrinking.
These link to the full issues on the newsletter. New pieces on this topic go out in the daily first.
Common questions
Why does China open-source its AI models?
Open weights are a distribution and standards play. A lab that cannot out-spend the frontier on chips can still set the default by making its stack the cheapest and most legal one to run anywhere, especially on domestic silicon.
What license is DeepSeek V4 under?
DeepSeek released V4 under the permissive MIT license in April 2026, open-weighting the model with Huawei Ascend as a primary deployment path.