US AI startups increasingly built on Chinese open-source foundations

Chinese open-source models (like DeepSeek and Qwen) have surpassed US models in global downloads (17% vs 15.8% market share).

Risks: imported censorship/ideology in weights; regulatory surprises if US decides some of those models are "foreign critical tech."

Payoff: price/perf / context length that's very attractive to early-stage founders.

Also, DeepSeek v3.2 got released.

Top 12 nations map ranked by all time huggingface downloads 🤗

Developer and National Market Share

Model Size Distribution

Model Modality Distribution