Open vs. Closed LLM & My Personal Take on the Reason for Such Divide

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One thing I find strangely under-discussed in AI right now is this:

Why is the open-model movement increasingly concentrated in China… while most leading US frontier models are becoming more and more closed?

The divide is becoming very obvious.

On one side, you have OpenAI, Anthropic, Google DeepMind — highly closed ecosystems, tightly controlled APIs, limited transparency.

On the other side, you see DeepSeek, Qwen and others pushing open-weight models aggressively into the market.

I keep thinking about why this split exists.

My guess is that the two sides are optimizing for completely different endgames:

The West still thinks the AI race is about building the smartest model.

China seems to think the race is about building the biggest ecosystem.

Effectively, the US AI giants are behaving like software companies. The Chinese AI players are behaving like infrastructure builders. Closed models optimize for monetization and control. Open models optimize for adoption and ecosystem dependency.

If enough developers, enterprises, universities, and governments build on your open stack, you eventually become the gravitational center of the ecosystem — even if your model is not number one on every benchmark.

And honestly, from a national strategy perspective, it makes sense.

The US already dominates the global tech stack: Cloud. Chips. Operating systems. Developer tooling. Protecting the moat is rational.

China is playing a different game. It is trying to accelerate AI diffusion as fast as possible across industries, platforms, and countries. Open models dramatically increase that surface area.

There is also a practical reality people rarely talk about.

When compute supply is constrained, you stop relying purely on brute-force scaling. You become obsessed with efficiency, optimization, and accessibility instead.

That pressure may have unintentionally pushed Chinese labs toward a much more open engineering culture.

The fascinating part is this:

The US may continue leading the frontier. But China could quietly become the default open AI layer that much of the world builds on top of.

And in technology, the platform everybody builds on usually matters more than the company with the single smartest product.