Commentary
When the disruptor gets disrupted: How Chinese open-source AI is eating its own industry
Cheap, ‘good enough’ Chinese models are doing to Western AI labs what Grab did to taxis and Netflix did to Blockbuster.
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Alibaba’s Qwen alone has overtaken Meta’s Llama to become the most downloaded open-source model family in history.
ST PHOTO: JASEL POH
It’s ironic to watch an industry disrupting itself. Artificial intelligence was supposed to be the great disruptor – the technology that would hollow out call centres, law firms, accountants and coding jobs. That might well have started to happen. But meanwhile, something stranger is happening.
AI is disrupting AI. The very companies that promised to remake every other industry are now getting a taste of their own medicine, courtesy of a wave of free, open-source models pouring out of China.
