China's AI models are closing the gap on the West

Chinese companies like Alibaba and ByteDance are pushing out open models that are getting harder to dismiss as cheap knockoffs. The models are landing in the same conversation as OpenAI and Meta's flagships — not because some analyst said so, but because the benchmarks and real-world tests keep moving.

This isn't a Silicon Valley story. It's a supply-chain story. The chips, the compute, the talent pipeline — a lot of it flows through Shenzhen and Hangzhou now. The models themselves are open, which means they end up in the same tools and apps that independent developers and small shops are already using.

Why this matters for us: if the best models are coming from Chinese labs instead of American ones, the software we build and the services we rely on are already shifting — whether we notice or not.