Airbnb boss Brian Chesky told Bloomberg in October his company relied “a lot” on Alibaba’s Qwen to power its AI customer service agent.
He gave three simple reasons - it’s “very good”, “fast” and “cheap”.
Going into 2025, the consensus was despite billions of dollars being spent by US tech firms, Chinese companies were threatening to pull ahead.
“That’s not the story anymore,” Boudier said. “Now, the best model is an open-source model.”
A report published last month by Stanford University found Chinese AI models “seem to have caught up or even pulled ahead” of their global counterparts - both in terms of what they’re capable of, and how many people are using them.
Interesting stuff. I hope Sam Altman loses everything.
Interesting stuff. I hope Sam Altman loses everything.
The whole AI as a service business model is cooked now. My prediction is that even stuff like coding will soon work well enough with local models. There are going to be very few cases to justify paying subscription for AI services either for companies or individuals. And this stuff is moving so incredibly fast. For example https://dev.to/yakhilesh/china-just-released-the-first-coding-ai-of-2026-and-its-crushing-everything-we-know-3bbj
Can’t wait for the bargain bin data center hdds