More and more tech leaders in the West are speaking up about the rapid progress that China has made in the space.
Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Databricks and a prominent figure in the AI research community, recently made an interesting observation about the shifting landscape of artificial intelligence research. His comments highlight a reversal in the flow of cutting-edge AI knowledge—one that has significant implications for Western tech companies and researchers. Konwinski pointed to a trend that many in Silicon Valley have been reluctant to acknowledge publicly: China has taken the lead in open science and research discourse.
“What’s happened in the last year is Western open science and research discourse has lost the number one spot to China,” Konwinski stated. He backed up this assertion with direct evidence from those at the forefront of AI research: “If you ask Stanford and Berkeley PhD students, which I have dozens of them, where are the best papers? The most interesting papers about AI coming from? (They say) I read twice as many interesting papers by Chinese startups than I did by Americans, because they just make an effort.”
Konwinski specifically called out several Chinese companies leading this charge. “Moonshot, Kimi, DeepSeek, they’re publishing really interesting stuff. They make an effort to talk about it,” he noted. The contrast with American companies, according to Konwinski, couldn’t be starker. “Whereas in the United States, since OpenAI closed their doors and stopped publishing, so did all the other labs. And by and large you don’t get to publish. You are actually working on the frontier at those labs, but you’re not talking about it.”
Konwinski isn’t the only researcher from the US who has spoken up about China’s growing stature in AI. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has previously said that China is not behind the US in AI, and that it has 50% of the world’s AI researchers and accounts for 70% of the patents. An a16z partner has said that 80% of the firms they evaluate running open-source models are using Chinese models, and Marc Andreessen has said that the US and China could be in a cold war over AI. It had recently been reported that Chinese models had replaced US models as open models of choice for the first time.
The implications of China’s dominance in open-source AI could be profound. When OpenAI transitioned from its original open-research model to a more closed, commercially-focused approach, it set a precedent that other leading American AI labs quickly followed. Companies like Anthropic, Google DeepMind, and Meta have all become increasingly guarded about their frontier research, citing competitive concerns and safety considerations. Meanwhile, Chinese companies have seized the opportunity to fill the void, gaining mindshare among the very PhD students who represent the future of AI research. This creates a troubling dynamic: the best minds in Western universities are increasingly looking eastward for inspiration and knowledge, while groundbreaking work happening in their own backyard remains hidden behind corporate walls. If this trend continues, the West risks not just losing its technological edge, but also its ability to attract and retain top talent in the field that may define the 21st century.