By Caiwei Chen
Publication Date: 2026-02-12 10:00:00
DeepSeek’s success boosted the confidence of an industry long used to following global standards rather than setting them. “Thirty years ago, no Chinese person would have believed they could be at the center of global innovation,” says Alex Chenglin Wu, CEO and founder of Atoms, an AI agent company and prominent contributor to China’s open source ecosystem. “DeepSeek shows that with solid technical talent, a supportive environment and the right organizational culture, it is possible to do truly world-class work.”
DeepSeek’s breakthrough wasn’t China’s first open source success. Alibaba’s Qwen Lab has been releasing open weight models for years. By September 2024, well before the launch of DeepSeeks V3, Alibaba said global downloads had exceeded 600 million. At Hugging Face, Qwen accounted for more than 30% of all model downloads in 2024. Other institutions, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence and AI company Baichuan, were also…