Big Technology Podcast · Wednesday, July 29, 2026
Grace Shao discusses how China's AI development benefits from a robust open-source ecosystem, fostering collegial competition. The availability of open-source research and models lowers the barrier to entry for new companies. This environment allows labs like Deepseek and Kimi to focus on specific strengths, such as infrastructure innovation or agentic capabilities, rather than broadly competing across all AI dimensions.
“And then the last thing is I think, um, it's a shared R&D and I think this is something we can definitely talk about a bit more beyond just the Kimi breakthrough. It's just that the open source ecosystem has really harness this pretty collegial, um, competition. And there's a lot of, you know, um, uh, I guess, advantage for a lot of these companies to jump into the arena because they already have, you know, open source open weight research available. So, you know, the barrier to entry was frankly about lower.”
“That's a great point. And I double click on that. I think both, you know, deepseek and Kimi, if not seen as, you know, the top two labs right now coming out of China, both founders have openly talked a lot about management of people, um, removing distractions, focus on the pursuit of AI, not kind of getting distracted into consumer applications or whatnot.”