Open source \u2014 that might be the clearest signal of how China wants artificial intelligence to reshape its economy.<\/p>\n
Hisham Alrayes, the group CEO of Bahrain-based GFH Financial Group, said China is prioritizing open models<\/a> and broad deployment to spread AI’s gains across the economy, instead of funneling them to a few tech giants.<\/p>\n Speaking at a Davos panel on China’s “AI+ Economy” strategy on Wednesday, Alrayes said the country’s approach<\/a> reflects a fundamentally different economic philosophy.<\/p>\n “You look at the open structure of the China AI philosophy \u2014 then you have the non-open structure,” Alrayes said. “That signals that the benefit they want to see is to trickle down into the economy, into the companies.”<\/p>\n Open source as economic strategy<\/p>\n China’s most prominent AI breakout, DeepSeek<\/a>, reflects that philosophy.<\/p>\n It mostly uses open-source models<\/a> that have drawn global attention, in contrast to many large US language models that remain closed and proprietary, reaping the benefits of tightly controlled commercial ecosystems.<\/p>\n Meta’s former chief AI scientist Yann LeCun<\/a>, has said that a key reason behind DeepSeek’s success is its open-source model, which, he said, can outperform proprietary models in terms of efficiency and innovation by building on shared research.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, former Google CEO Eric Schmidt<\/a> has said that China’s open-source AI models could gain an edge globally because they’re free, making them more attractive than costly proprietary US systems for governments and countries that can’t afford closed models.<\/p>\n