China’s open weighted model is not only 60-90% cheaper, but its functionality is also very close to that of top-tier American models. Western AI companies have distilled Chinese models including Mistral distilling DeepSeek; Meta Muse Spark used Qwen from Alibaba, Thinking Machines Inkling uses DeepSeek-V3; and Cursor’s Composer 2 was built directly on Moonshot.
Tag: MiniMax
Chinese AI progress and top companies
Chinese AI is not just DeepSeek. Nearly half of the world’s top AI researchers come from China, and only 18% come from the United States. China owns 65% of the world’s artificial intelligence patents.