Top US tech companies are holding developers in closed-source AI ecosystems, Ant Group says

China’s Ant Group warns of fake promises around open-sourced AI
Nvidia, OpenAI and Google are criticized for their fake efforts
Open-sourcing AI models could be China’s success

Chinese fintech giant and Alipay operator Ant Group has accused US tech giants (like OpenAI, Nvidia and Google) of using open-source tools to lock developers into their closed-source AI ecosystems.

For example, Nvidia’s Dynamo (open-sourced in March 2024) is marketed as the operating system of AI, however it’s been specifically optimized for Nvidia GPUs.

Ant Group also accused OpenAI and Google of releasing open-source AI agent frameworks, but they’ve been designed specifically for their proprietary models.

Open-source AI isn’t actually open-source

As an industry-leading tool for high-throughput, multi-model deployment, Dynamo will further encourage enterprises to choose Nvidia hardware to maximise performance gains,” the report noted (via SCMP).

Ant contrasted US practices with those of Chinese firms – Alibaba Cloud and ByteDance have open-sourced their models, letting developers download and build on them. This hasn’t just led to widespread adoption of Chinese models, but their adoption by US startups too.

The group also raised concerns over market share, with Microsoft retaining a 39% market share in foundation models and model management platforms, and Nvidia boasting a huge 92% share of the data center GPU market.

The report also found that more than half of global open-source AI ecosystem contributions come from the US (37.4%) and China (18.7%).

Open-source AI models allow researchers to study how they work, improving trust and accountability, but it also allows startups to experiment more cheaply. However, they can also be misused for for harmful purposes, and they still require access to expensive GPUs.

While many US firms tend to keep their models closed-source and open-source the tools around them, like toolchains and frameworks, China sees open-sourcing its models as a way to challenge US dominance.