Obviously OpenAI betrayed their stated mandate by going to the largely closed-source API-access business model, which is the one that Anthropic, Google, and xAI also adopted, i.e. the high-margin hosted model businesses, while DeepSeek, Alibaba/Qwen, Baidu/ERNIE, and Tencent/Hunyuan are breaking that model by releasing various open weight models.

I think the Chinese labs have a fundamentally different viewpoint: they’re building infrastructure, and looking at it more like how a US corporation might like having some of its employees making core contributions to compiler ecosystems like LLVM/clang and so on. The payoff is down the road, partially reputational, but also having a great compiler is good for everyone in the computational business world. The rentier-finance capitalist instead wants to privatize the compiler and extract rents for access.

The thing about infrastructure is this: you don’t get a direct financial return on investment in infrastructure (think roads, which make other economic activity possible) unless you have some ridiculously corrupt system controlled by rent-collectors (which is how the US electricity grid and fiber optic backbone works). That’s all the major US LLM providers are doing: trying to collect rents on systems that were built using the global human knowledge base as inputs.

At the very least OpenAI should be releasing their older models on a steady timetable. Sure it might reduce some revenue streams but it would be good for their reputation.