Tatia Bolkvadze

Right, so Quan did not get as much media attention in the West as DeepSeq and some of the other kind of smaller Chinese AI models did in the beginning.

Quan was launched in 2023 for the first time, but this sort of DeepSeq moment really forced Alibaba to step up innovation and increase funding in AI.

So Quan managed to get pretty significant global footing.

over the past year.

It has been downloaded more than 600 million times.

It's been used pretty widely internationally, not just within China.

Its customers now count companies like Airbnb.

And also last December, Quen became the most downloaded open source AI model.

So beyond just sort of showcasing Alibaba's success in this domain, the success of Quen and DeepSeek and this group of other Chinese open source AI models is really showing that the strategy of making models cheap and freely available is working for Beijing.

Right, absolutely.

I have to agree with Josh here.

And I think it's important to note also that Huawei's previous success in the Global South is also paving a way for Chinese AI models as well.

Because if you look at Huawei's sort of phone adoption in the Global South,

That's enabling the adoption of Chinese AI models like DeepSync because DeepSync is the default AI chatbot on Huawei phones.

So we've seen a very rapid adoption in countries like Iran, Ethiopia, Niger, and others.

But also the open source strategy that we mentioned before, China is using this as a way to advance its image as the champion of the developing world.

It's painting open source strategy as a way to democratize access to AI data.

At the 2024 G20 summit, President Xi famously noted that AI should not become a game of rich countries.

And since then, Beijing has really stepped up convening international conferences which are catered specifically to the Global South.

And you see a lot of the members here