Chinese labs lead open-weight models in benchmarks, downloads, and research use

Nathan Lambert argues that Chinese open-weight models now lead American ones on benchmarks, Hugging Face downloads, and OpenRouter usage.

He estimates the gap to the American closed frontier at 2 to 5 months for Chinese open models and 6 to 9 months for American open models.

The piece also reports that Chinese open-weight models were mentioned in over 40% of arXiv papers he scanned, compared with 30% for American models.