Open sourcing models is a marketing strategy. Chinese labs and small international labs have no awareness or distribution, so unless they become a hot topic for a while, nobody is going to bother trying out their models. Open source gets them that, and is essentially a tax on newcomers. When you start out you simply have no other option but to open source your models.

So, the business model of open models is the same as closed models: Sell inference. Open source is marketing for that inference.

https://try.works/#why-chinese-ai-labs-went-open-and-will-re...