What’s next for Chinese open-source AI

MIT Technology Review says that after DeepSeek released R1 in January 2025, Chinese firms kept shipping open-weight models near top Western systems; Moonshot AI’s Kimi K2.5 was close to Anthropic Claude Opus on early benchmarks at about one-seventh the price. The post also says Qwen took over 30% of Hugging Face downloads in 2024 and surpassed Meta Llama in cumulative downloads by 2025–2026; the key shift is from a few general models to many fine-tunable, distillable variants.

Why it matters: All three HKR axes pass. This is not a launch, but it offers concrete market signals—~1/7 pricing, Hugging Face download share, and a clear thesis that Chinese open source is moving toward specialized, distillable variants—so it merits featured, not p1.