Grace Hsiao

Thank you so much for having me, Joe and Tracy.

Yeah, I think people like to think of these mystical reasons, but really it was a very pragmatic business reason to start with.

To start with, a lot of the labs have cited that, you know, for Western companies or Western developers to trust them, they needed to open source their models to build that trust and credibility.

So in many ways, it's a branding decision.

Then on top of that, I think you can see it as a philosophical drive.

You know, the founder of Deep Seek, Liang Wenfeng, has openly said he wants open source, his most frontier research to really help propel the whole industry as a whole.

And that kind of R&D sharing has now formed a layer for the whole ecosystem where each of the labs kind of

integrate each other's kind of breakthroughs.

You know, you see them congratulating each other, even on X when they have new models announced.

So you can say it's a bit more collegial.

I wouldn't say they're not competing though.

However, because of the compute constraint they're faced with, talent constraint, and the capital constraint you even mentioned, they are a lot more conscious with where they want to put their money.

where they want to put their time in R&D.

And all of that forms the basis of a strong open source ecosystem.

I think the sharing is an unintentional result rather than, you know, an intentional effort in the beginning to even start with.

They are for sure extremely competitive.

And, you know, we all know the word involution.

So like China AI is dreading as well.

That means like there's involution in this ecosystem as well.

However, I think bringing up DeepSeek, DeepSeek plays a very interesting role in the whole ecosystem.