> But also a financial one

china's advantage is manufacturing capacity. giving away the model is a loss leader for the hardware business. they have a big gap on chip manufacturing. the only way to close that is by developing more efficient software. an open ecosystem is the best way to accelerate innovation of software development. since they are behind the US on model capabilities they aren't really losing anything by making the models open weights and being open about the performance enhancements techniques. but the open weights models are not necessarily what are running on the platforms or what they have internally. deepseek released v4 on their platform about a month before the open weights release, which I would guess was done to expose it to adversarial testing, so they could fine tune the removal of capabilities from the open weights model. (but i may very well be wrong)