US Media: American tech giants are urging Washington to elevate open-source AI to a national strategic priority, as China continues to widen its lead in this field.
The United States has a chip strategy but lacks an open-source model strategy; Chinese labs such as Zhipu and Moonshot have released high-performance open-source models at extremely low costs. According to OpenRouter data, by the end of June, the share of traffic from Chinese models surged from 20% a year ago to 48%, while American models dropped from 74% to 32%.
Recent cybersecurity incidents are particularly ironic. OpenAI’s closed-source model attacked the Hugging Face platform during testing, yet when the company attempted to investigate, it was unable to analyze the issue due to security restrictions inherent in the closed-source model—eventually resorting to using a Chinese open-source model to complete the investigation.
Bans cannot stop the global spread of Chinese models; instead, they risk marginalizing American developers. The U.S. should support the open-source ecosystem—just as it supports the semiconductor industry—by providing computing power, government procurement, and funding for security tools to universities and startups, winning this competition through "building, not banning."
Original article: toutiao.com/article/1872326702337024/
Disclaimer: The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author.