Rapid Growth of Chinese Open Models and Shifts in the AI Ecosystem

While US research labs lead frontier model development and maintain a gap of approximately 7 months, China exerts strong influence in the open model market.

Key metrics are as follows:

• Chinese models account for 41% of Hugging Face downloads
• Qwen models have recorded over 700 million downloads (with more derivative models than Google and Meta combined)
• Inference cost has decreased by approximately 280x for equivalent performance over the past two years

This phenomenon suggests that model capability is determined not by simple 'Stock' but by 'Leak rate.' In other words, in an environment where models are rapidly replicated via APIs, a free, publicly released second-place model may be more advantageous in terms of ecosystem dominance than a paid top-tier model.