How open model ecosystems compound – by Nathan Lambert

In a world where research and development is most of the compute, the Chinese system is designed around quickly learning from your peers and avoiding double-spending research compute — or infra effort. It’s far from perfect, but it’s the closest analog to the OSS ecosystem that one can get for building LLMs. The public discussion of AI has always emphasized that the models are expensive in a way that naturally lets passive readers think this is compute just dedicated to the artifact — as we saw with DeepSeek V3.

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