When the Have-Nots Become the Haves: China's Open-Source AI Rethink Isn't About China
Shimmy Says
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15m
For years, the AI narrative seemed simple: American companies built the frontier while Chinese labs responded with increasingly capable open-source alternatives. Most people read that as an ideological commitment to openness.Alan Shimel isn't so sure. In this episode of Shimmy Says, Alan connects a Wall Street Journal report that Beijing is weighing export restrictions on China's most advanced AI models to one of the oldest patterns in technology, business, and politics: the have-nots embrace openness because it helps them compete. Once they become the haves, their incentives quietly change. From DeepSeek, Qwen, Zhipu, and Kimi to Linux, Kubernetes, and Git — from HashiCorp's OpenTofu fork to Elastic and MongoDB's relicensing decisions — Alan shows why this shift was almost inevitable, and why every nation that develops strategically important AI eventually faces the same choice. And he asks the question almost nobody in the coverage is asking: Can you actually fork a frontier model?
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