"Fortune": The AI competition has shifted from "US-China confrontation" to "open source versus closed source."

Fortune magazine recently published a commentary article pointing out that with the rapid rise of China's open-source AI models, the competitive landscape of the global AI field is changing. The real contest has shifted from U.S.-China rivalry to the battle between open-source and closed-source models. The article cites data from the independent evaluation platform Artificial Analysis, stating that the intelligence index of DeepSeek V4 Flash is only 1 point lower than that of GPT-5.6 Luna. Even though OpenAI has reduced prices by 80%, the former's single-task cost is still 60% lower.

The author notes that while U.S. export control policies aim to limit China's AI development, they have objectively stimulated innovation at the architectural level among Chinese companies, forcing them to shift towards open-source and low-cost routes. Chinese models attract global developers to participate in improvements by opening weights, while transferring inference costs to overseas cloud service providers, achieving a low-cost global layout. Regarding the viewpoint that open-source models "cannot be profitable," the article argues that their profit model is similar to that of open-source software: users pay for hosting services, and most companies are not inclined to self-deploy.

The article also points out that recently, several figures in the U.S. tech community, including former White House AI official David Sacks, have begun to support open-source, and NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has also called for the industry to embrace open-source. The author urges both China and the U.S. to cooperate in the field of AI security, viewing open-source AI as a "global public good," rather than falling into a zero-sum competition that costs trillions of dollars.