The Chinese are the open ones, with free downloads, open weights, and loads of published research. The USA with OpenAI is some of the most closed shit out there.
There's gpt-oss from OpenAI, gemma from Google, phi from Microsoft, granite from IBM, nemotron from NVIDIA, Ornith from DeepReinforce, Olmo from the Allen Institute.
compared to the chinese models those are all garbage. its almost as if there is a minimum effort being made just to later say "see, we werent always for the closed models, its just that the open stuff was so far behind". or maybe they think that an environment full of terrible models will push everyone harder into the closed stuff.
Nemotron Ultra is extremely competitive. gemma4 beats many 200B+ parameter models at a 31b size. gpt-oss is still a workhorse in many of my workflows despite being almost a year old now.
I'm all for more OSS models by American companies, and I think they could do much more than they are. But the perception that China is the only game in town for OSS doesn't hold up against the basic facts on the ground.
The Chinese are the open ones, with free downloads, open weights, and loads of published research. The USA with OpenAI is some of the most closed shit out there.