The Future of the Global Open-Source AI Ecosystem: From DeepSeek to AI+

Summary

This third and final article in a series examines how Chinese AI organizations are shaping an open-source ecosystem after DeepSeek R1's January 2025 release. It argues that open sharing of models, papers, deployment infrastructure, and techniques has become the dominant near-term approach, with organizations ranging from Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and Baidu to startups and application companies contributing at different layers. Qwen illustrates the ecosystem strategy: by mid-2025, more than 113,000 Hugging Face models used Qwen as a base, while organizations also connected models with chips, cloud platforms, toolchains, evaluation, and deployment systems. The article places this shift on infrastructure built since 2017, including the East Data, West Compute plan, and says R1 catalyzed wider use of existing compute, energy, and data capacity. It concludes that open-source models are becoming reusable, composable components in industrial workflows and localized AI systems as China moves from DeepSeek toward AI+.

Takeaways

1. 1

   Qwen had more than 113,000 Hugging Face models using it as a base by mid-2025, with more than 200,000 repositories tagging Qwen.

2. 2

   Research institutions and community projects such as FlagOpen, OpenDataLab, and OpenCompass focused on toolchains, evaluation, data platforms, and deployment infrastructure rather than only single-model performance.

3. 3

   The article describes a shift from isolated model breakthroughs toward reusable and composable open-source components embedded in industrial workflows and localized AI systems.