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China is focusing on large language models (LLMs) in the artificial intelligence space. 

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China is embracing open-source AI models in a trend market watchers and insiders say is boosting AI adoption and innovation in the country, with some suggesting it is an ‘Android moment’ for the sector.

The open-source shift has been spearheaded by AI startup DeepSeek, whose R1 model released earlier this year challenged American tech dominance and raised questions over Big Tech’s massive spending on large language models and data centers. 

While R1 created a splash in the sector due to its performance and claims of lower costs, some analysts say the most significant impact of DeepSeek has been in catalyzing the adoption of open-source AI models. 

“DeepSeek’s success proves that open-source strategies can lead to faster innovation and broad adoption,” said Wei Sun, principal analyst of artificial intelligence at Counterpoint Research, noting a large number of firms have implemented the model. 

“Now, we see that R1 is actively reshaping China’s AI landscape, with large companies like Baidu moving to open source their own LLMs in a strategic response,” she added. 

On March 16, Baidu released the latest version of its AI model, Ernie 4.5, as well as a new reasoning model, Ernie X1, making them free for individual users. Baidu also plans to make the Ernie 4.5 model series open-source from end-June. 

Experts say that Baidu’s open-source plans represent a broader shift in China, away from a business strategy that focuses on proprietary licensing. 

“Baidu has always been very supportive of its proprietary business model and was vocal against open-source, but disruptors like DeepSeek have proven that open-source models can be as competitive and reliable as proprietary ones,” Lian Jye Su, chief analyst with technology research and advisory group Omdia previously told CNBC.

Open-source vs proprietary models

Open-source generally refers to software in which the source code is made freely available on the web for possible modification and redistribution.

AI models that call themselves open-source had existed before the emergence of DeepSeek, with Meta‘s Llama and Google‘s Gemma being prime examples in the U.S. However, some experts argue that these models aren’t really open source as their licenses restrict certain uses and modifications, and their training data sets aren’t public.

DeepSeek’s R1 is distributed under an ‘MIT License,’ which Counterpoint’s Sun describes as one of the most permissive and widely adopted open-source licenses, facilitating unrestricted use, modification and distribution, including for commercial purposes.

The DeepSeek team even held an “Open-Source Week” last month, which saw it release more technical details about the development of its R1 model. 

While DeepSeek’s model itself is free, the start-up charges for Application Programming Interface, which enables the integration of AI models and their capabilities into other companies’ applications. However, its API charges are advertised to be far cheaper compared with OpenAI and Anthropic’s latest offerings.

OpenAI and Anthropic also generate revenue by charging individual users and enterprises to access some of their models. These models are considered to be ‘closed-source,’ as their datasets, and algorithms are not open for public access.

China opens up

In addition to Baidu, other Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba Group and Tencent have increasingly been providing their AI offerings for free and are making more models open source.

For example, Alibaba Cloud said last month it was open-sourcing its AI models for video generation, while Tencent reportedly released five new open-source models earlier this month with the ability to convert text and images into 3D visuals.

Smaller players are also furthering the trend. ManusAI, a Chinese AI firm that recently unveiled an AI agent that claims to outperform OpenAI’s Deep Research, has said it would shift towards open source.

“This wouldn’t be possible without the amazing open-source community, which is why we’re committed to giving back” co-founder Ji Yichao said in a product demo video. “ManusAI operates as a multi-agent system powered by several distinct models, so later this year, we’re going to open source some of these models,” he added.

Zhipu AI, one of the country’s leading AI startups, this month announced on WeChat that 2025 would be “the year of open source.”

Ray Wang, principal analyst and founder of Constellation Research, told CNBC that companies have been compelled to make these moves following the emergence of DeepSeek.

“With DeepSeek free, it’s impossible for any other Chinese competitors to charge for the same thing. They have to move to open-source business models in order to compete,” said Wang. 

AI scholar and entrepreneur Kai-Fu Lee also believes this dynamic will impact OpenAI, noting in a recent social media post that it would be difficult for the company to justify its pricing when the competition is “free and formidable.”

“The biggest revelation from DeepSeek is that open-source has won,” said Lee, whose Chinese startup 01.AI has built an LLM platform for enterprises seeking to use DeepSeek.

U.S.-China competition

OpenAI — which started the AI frenzy when it released its ChatGPT bot in November 2022— has not signaled that it plans to shift from its proprietary business model. The company which started as a nonprofit in 2015 is moving towards towards a for-profit structure.

Sun says that OpenAI and DeepSeek both represent very different ends of the AI space. She adds that the sector could continue to see division between open-source players that innovate off one another and closed-source companies that have come under pressure to maintain high-cost cutting-edge models. 

The open-source trend has put in to question the massive funds raised by companies such as OpenAI. Microsoft has invested $13 billion into the company. It is in talks to raise up to $40 billion in a funding round that would lift its valuation to as high as $340 billion, CNBC confirmed at the end of January.

In September, CNBC confirmed the company expects about $5 billion in losses, with revenue pegged at $3.7 billion revenue. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, has also said that $11 billion in revenue is “definitely in the realm of possibility” for the company this year.

China's open-source AI push is an Android moment and a huge sentiment boost: Hedge fund manager

On the other hand, Chinese companies have chosen the open-source route as they compete with the more proprietary approach of U.S. firms, said Constellation Research’s Wang. “They are hoping for faster adoption than the closed models of the U.S.,” he added. 

Speaking to CNBC’s “Street Signs Asia” on Wednesday, Tim Wang, managing partner of tech-focused hedge fund Monolith Management, said that models from companies such as DeepSeek have been “great enablers and multipliers in China,” demonstrating how things can be done with more limited resources.

According to Wang, open-source models have pushed down costs, opening doors for product innovation — something he says Chinese companies historically have been very good at.

He calls the development the “Android moment,” referring to when Google’s Android made its operating system source code freely available, fostering innovation and development in the non-Apple app ecosystem.

“We used to think China was 12 to 24 months behind [the U.S.] in AI and now we think that’s probably three to six months,” said Wang.

However, other experts have downplayed the idea that open-source AI should be seen through the lens of China and U.S. competition. In fact, several U.S. companies have integrated and benefited from DeepSeek’s R1. 

“I think the so-called DeepSeek moment is not about whether China has better AI than the U.S. or vice versa. It’s really about the power of open-source,” Alibaba Group Chairperson Joe Tsai told CNBC’s CONVERGE conference in Singapore earlier this month. 

Tsai added that open-source models give the power of AI to everyone from small entrepreneurs to large corporations, which will lead to more development, innovation and a proliferation of AI applications.

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Nvidia says it will record $5.5 billion charge tied to H20 processors exported to China

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Nvidia says it will record .5 billion charge tied to H20 processors exported to China

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang delivers the keynote address during the Nvidia GTC 2025 at SAP Center on March 18, 2025 in San Jose, California. 

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Nvidia said on Tuesday that it will take a quarterly charge of about $5.5 billion tied to exporting H20 graphics processing units to China and other destinations. The stock slid more than 6% in extended trading.

On April 9, the U.S. government told Nvidia it would require a license to export the chips to China and a handful of other countries, the company said in a filing.

The disclosure is the strongest sign so far that Nvidia’s historic growth could be slowed by increased export restrictions on its chips, which the U.S. government says can be used to create supercomputers for military uses. Nvidia reports fiscal first-quarter results on May 28.

During President Biden’s administration, the U.S. restricted AI chip exports in 2022 and then updated the rules the following year to prevent the sale of more advanced AI processors. The H20 is an AI chip for China that was designed to comply with U.S. export restrictions. It generated an estimated $12 billion to $15 billion in revenue in 2024.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said on the company’s last quarterly earnings call in February that revenue from China had dropped to half of pre-export control levels. Huang warned that competition in China is growing, and for the second straight year, Nvidia listed Huawei as a competitor in its annual filing.

China is Nvidia’s fourth-largest region by sales, after the U.S., Singapore, and Taiwan, according to the company’s annual report. More than half of its sales went to U.S. companies in its fiscal year that ended in January.

Nvidia’s H20 chip is comparable to the H100 and H200 AI chips used in the U.S. and other countries, but it has slower interconnection speeds and bandwidth. It’s based on a previous generation of AI architecture called Hopper introduced in 2022. Nvidia is now focusing on selling its current generation of AI chips, called Blackwell.

DeepSeek, the Chinese company whose competitive AI model R1 unveiled earlier this year upended markets, used H20 chips in its research.

In addition to the existing Chinese export controls, Nvidia also faces new restrictions on what it can export starting next month, under “AI diffusion rules” first proposed by the Biden administration.

Nvidia has argued that further controls on its chips would stifle competition and potentially even erode U.S. competitiveness in technology. The company previously said it moved some of its operations, including testing and distribution, out of China after the 2022 export controls.

At the company’s annual conference last month, when asked about Chinese export controls, Huang said Nvidia works to comply with the law, but he also noted that about half of the world’s AI researchers are from China, and many of those work at U.S.-based AI labs. 

Nvidia said in Tuesday’s filing that the U.S. government told the company on Monday that the license requirement for H20 chips would be in effect “for the indefinite future.”

Nvidia shares have dropped 16% this year, largely due to President Trump’s announcement of widespread tariffs on top trading partners. While exemptions have been made on various electronics products, including smartphones, computers and semiconductors, Trump and some officials said over the weekend that the reprieve was temporary and part of plans to apply separate tariffs to the sector.

Shares of Advanced Micro Devices dropped more than 7% in after-hours trading on Tuesday following Nvidia’s disclosure. AI chipmaker Broadcom fell almost 4%.

WATCH: Nvidia says U.S. requires license to export H20 products to China

Nvidia says U.S. requires license to export H20 products to China

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Figma confidentially files for IPO more than a year after ditching Adobe deal

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Figma confidentially files for IPO more than a year after ditching Adobe deal

Dylan Field, co-founder and CEO of Figma Inc., after the morning sessions at the Allen & Co. Media and Technology Conference in Sun Valley, Idaho, on July 11, 2024.

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Design software maker Figma said on Tuesday that it has submitted paperwork to the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission for an initial public offering.

The confidential filing lands 16 months after the company scrapped a deal to be acquired by Adobe for $20 billion due to regulatory pressure in the U.K. The San Francisco startup had originally agreed to the deal 2022. Adobe paid Figma a $1 billion termination fee.

Figma’s software is popular among designers inside companies who need to collaborate on prototypes for websites and apps. The company was valued at $12.5 billion in a 2024 tender offer.

“There are two paths that venture-funded startups go down,” Dylan Field, Figma’s co-founder and CEO, said in an interview with The Verge last year. “You either get acquired or you go public. And we explored thoroughly the acquisition route.”

The announcement lands at a precarious moment for the tech IPO market, which has been largely dormant since late 2021. The Trump presidency was expected to revive new offerings due to promises of less burdensome regulations.

But after filing their prospectuses with the SEC, fintech company Klarna and online ticket marketplace StubHub delayed their IPOs earlier this month following the market turmoil caused by Trump’s announcements on widespread tariffs. Digital banking service Chime, which had filed confidentially with the SEC, also postponed its planned offering.

Turo, a car-sharing service, withdrew its IPO prospectus in February, three years after filing its initial prospectus.

Figma was founded in 2012 and is backed by investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Durable Capital, Greylock Partners, Index Ventures, Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia Capital. The company, which ranked 26th on CNBC’s Disruptor 50 list in 2024, had about $600 million in annual revenue as of early last year.

— CNBC’s Ari Levy contributed to this report.

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram from Facebook in 2018: FTC trial

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning off Instagram from Facebook in 2018: FTC trial

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Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg considered spinning out Instagram in 2018 on concerns about the rising threat of antitrust litigation against Facebook, according to an email presented Tuesday in a Washington, D.C. courtroom.

During Zuckerberg’s second day of testimony in Meta’s antitrust trial with the Federal Trade Commission, lawyers representing the FTC introduced an email from May 2018, in which Zuckerberg appeared to comment on the possibility of separating the photo-sharing app his company purchased in 2012 for $1 billion.

“And i’m beginning to wonder whether spinning Instagram out is the the only structure that will accomplish a number of important goals,” Zuckerberg wrote in the email. “As calls to break up the big tech companies grow, there is a non-trivial chance that we will be forced to spin out Instagram and perhaps WhatsApp in the next 5-10 years anyway. This is one more factor we should consider.”

Facebook bought Instagram in 2012, when the photo app had 13 employees and Zuckerberg was poised to take his company public in what, at the time, was the largest tech IPO on record. The purchase of Instagram and 2014 acquisition of WhatsApp for $19 billion are at the heart of the blockbuster antitrust trial that kicked off Monday and could last weeks.

The FTC alleges that Meta monopolizes the social networking market, and has argued that the company shouldn’t have been able to complete those acquisitions. The agency is seeking to cleave the apps from Meta as a possible remedy.

Meta disputes the FTC’s allegations and claims the regulator mischaracterizes the competitive landscape and fails to acknowledge a number of rivals like TikTok and Apple’s iMessage, and not merely other apps like Snapchat. Earlier in the trial, the FTC also presented an Oct. 2013 email in which Zuckerberg told other Facebook executives that Snap CEO Evan Spiegel rebuffed his $6 billion offer to buy Snapchat.

Zuckerberg also said in the 2018 email that the company’s “best estimates are that, had Instagram remained independent, it would likely be around the size of Twitter or Snapchat with 300-400 million MAP today, rather than closer to 1 billion.” MAP is short for monthly active people.

WATCH: Mark Zuckerberg takes witness stand on first day of antitrust trial.

Mark Zuckerberg takes witness stand on first day of antitrust trial

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