The DeepSeek Moment for the Open Source Community

A few days ago, while researching text-to-video models, I discovered something that differed significantly from my original understanding: in the directions of text-to-image and text-to-video, Chinese companies' presence in the open source community is far weaker than in language models. I had always assumed Chinese models dominated across all fronts. But upon closer inspection, that's not the case. This led me to review the changes in the open source community over the past three years. Model Open Source Is Not Software Open Source First, let's discuss something many people may not have considered. With open source software, once the source code is released, there are no secrets left—you can rebuild an identical copy from scratch. Models are different. When models are open sourced, what you typically get are the weights and inference scripts. The core elements—training methods, training data, engineering details—usually remain undisclosed. What can you do with the weights? Deploy them