I think most of us that will claim to understand China are going to end up being wrong, unless any of us live there or grow up there. There’s a saying about China I have heard from ex-pats: the more you know about China, the less you know about China.
The point of me bringing that up is to say that what follows is really just my best guess:
If I were to judge from China’s approach to hardware, I think that the companies releasing open weight AI for free aren’t as worried about giving away too much as the West tends to be, just like a factory making robot vacuums isn’t worried about other factories copying their methods.
For one thing, Chinese firms are spending an order of magnitude or two less money training their models. They have pursued efficiency in a way that Western companies with insane capital systems haven’t bothered, and in some cases they’ve had to given their limited access to bleeding edge hardware via export restrictions.
My best guess is that more important than that, Chinese companies don’t see the open weight model itself as the value add.
At this point I don’t think we pay for Claude specifically for the model. If that was the case then we’d all be using cheaper/free models from China as they are the best model value. Basically, any time we decide not to use Fable or Opus to save costs, what’s the point of spending more than competing models to use Sonnet and Haiku?
The real reason we are using Claude is for the SaaS aspect of it. It has a toolchain, a friendly interface, and a bunch of integrations with business applications.
In this respect, it’s somewhat surprising that Western AI companies don’t publish open weight models more frequently. The struggle of setting that up yourself and figuring out which hardware can run it should be an advertisement for Claude and the rest.