I think it's a deliberate business strategy of commoditization of their complement.
China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.
China acts like an entire bloc, not as single companies, and they want to monetize hardware.
ByteDance is going the direct-to-consumer route with their Doubao chatbot (the most popular in China, probably thanks to their social media prowess). iFlyTek seems to be angling for enterprise and government use cases, where they already have an in.
The companies that have released weights have in common that they didn't have a monetization channel lined up and their models weren't good enough to make people pay attention with just API access. (You can see with Qwen Max that the calculus can change towards not releasing weights for better models.)
And who exactly among the investors is having their complement commoditized? When Nvidia releases Nemotron, the story is clear, but it's less obvious for say Z.ai's GLM.
> I have never said they always act as a bloc
Pick one