China’s free AI models may not stay free, Goldman says
For a year, the story of Chinese AI has been simple. It is nearly as good as the American frontier, and it is effectively free. That second part may be about to change.
Chinese developers could start charging cloud platforms commercial licensing fees to host their open-weight models, Goldman Sachs told the South China Morning Post. The bank calls the idea “paid weights.”
The logic is simple. Moonshot’s Kimi K3 and Zhipu’s GLM-5.2 now sit a fraction behind the best US systems, and are used heavily worldwide. They ship under open-source terms, so anyone can download and host the weights for free. The labs earn almost nothing from that use.
What paid weights would mean
The weights are the parameters that encode a model’s intelligence. Releasing them openly is what let Chinese labs spread so fast. It is also why that spread earns them so little.
Charging cloud platforms...
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