Kai-Fu Lee: Chinese labs open-source to survive DeepSeek competition, not government directive
Scobleizer · x · 2026-11-12
Kai-Fu Lee (former Google China CEO) says Chinese AI companies embrace open source not because of top-down government mandates, but market pressure: after DeepSeek V1 stunned China's dev community, every lab realized survival required beating DeepSeek and open-sourcing models, publishing research, and becoming the foundation for app developers.
With compute scarce, teams focused on efficiency and learned from each other — all models are open and every release comes with papers, creating rapid industry-wide knowledge diffusion.
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