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While the U.S. leads the AI race, China is said to have an advantage due to its development of an open-source AI ecosystem, driven by efforts to create models available for everyone.
**Experts Argue That Open-Source AI Models Are the Way to Go For America, But Big Tech Isn’t Ready For the Pivot**
There’s a debate over whether the U.S. should adopt an ‘open-source’ environment with its AI models. President Trump’s ‘AI action plan,’ aimed at fostering an environment where large language models (LLMs) are available for everyone, suggests this direction but faces resistance from major tech companies. Hugging Face CEO Clement Delangue commented on Twitter that without sharing science around AI models, the U.S. cannot create a collaborative structure with other nations, giving China an edge.
“In a tweet, he stated: A Chinese food delivery company contributes more to advancing AI than U.S. Big Tech thanks to open science and open-source AI. The U.S. is cooked if AI scientists don’t fight their management to get back to our roots of sharing science rather than keeping it secret.”
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His comments came in the context of an open-source AI model from Meituan, a Chinese food delivery company. Recently, Meituan showcased an innovative MoE model with 560 billion parameters, targeting automation in customer service and contributing to China’s ‘open-source AI’ boom.
Quoting details of the model, Delangue claimed that America’s AI management should share the science behind their models instead of keeping them closed-source. The U.S.’s inclination towards a closed-source approach is due to significant investments into AI training and inferencing, and firms like OpenAI and Anthropic relying on subscription or API-based revenue.
One key reason for this approach is that AI is seen as a massive business in the West, necessitating keeping advanced LLMs under lock and key to ensure differentiation from competitors. However, there’s a tradeoff: open-source models offer several advantages, including collaboration and innovation. China has been developing models using an open-source approach for years, while OpenAI’s recent efforts with gpt-oss show the need for U.S. AI industry to reconsider its stance.
Image Credits: Reuters / Dado Ruvic
