One Year Since the “DeepSeek Moment”

In the past year, China's open-source AI ecosystem has experienced significant growth and transformation, largely catalyzed by DeepSeek's R1 model, released in January 2025. This marked a pivotal moment, known as the “DeepSeek Moment,” that led to an explosion of new open models and players in the open-source space, with Chinese companies shifting their strategies from model-to-model comparisons to focusing on system-level capabilities. The R1 model notably lowered technical, adoption, and psychological barriers, allowing for advanced reasoning as a reusable module and encouraging faster iteration and broader adoption under the open-source MIT license. This shift has propelled Chinese AI models to prominence, with Chinese companies like Baidu, ByteDance, and Tencent significantly increasing their open-source contributions on platforms like Hugging Face. Globally, the adoption of open-source AI models has gained momentum, leading to increased recognition of open-source leadership's critical role in global competitiveness, with Western organizations seeking alternative models for commercial deployment. As a result, the Chinese AI community has garnered sustained global attention, and the ecosystem is evolving with shared technical, economic, and regulatory constraints driving competition and collaboration.