中國AI模型受歡迎，但能否賺錢？

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Chinese AI models are popular. But can they make money?

Building world-class software was the easy part

In the year since DeepSeek, a little-known artificial-intelligence lab from China, shocked the world with a whizzy new model, the country’s clout in AI has only grown. It is now the undisputed global leader in so-called open-weight models, which make freely available the numerical parameters learned during training (though not the underlying data or source code). On Hugging Face, a popular library for such open models, downloads of Chinese ones have now overtaken those from America (see chart 1).

This article appeared in the Business section of the print edition under the headline “Code red”

From the January 24th 2026 edition

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