A tier list of China's top 19 open model builders.
Who did we miss?
At the frontier
* DeepSeek
* Qwen
Close competitors
* Moonshot AI (Kimi)
* Zhipu / Z AI
Noteworthy
* StepFun
* Tencent (Hunyuan)
* RedNote (Xiaohongshu)
* MiniMax
* OpenGVLab / InternLM
* Skywork
On the rise
* ByteDance Seed
* OpenBMB
* Xiaomi (MiMo)
* Baidu (ERNIE)
Honorable Mentions
* Multimodal Art Projection
* Alibaba International Digital Commerce Group
* Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI)
* inclusionAI
* Pangu (Huawei)
I learned a lot from these. We have so much more we need to do to understand how their AI ecosystem works.
China's Top 19 Open Model Labs
We ranked all the organizations in China releasing open models, from the top of DeepSeek to small, newer academic labs making waves with tech reports and niche models.
interconnects.ai/p/chinas-to…
Interesting rankings. The open-source landscape is evolving so rapidly, even this list may soon change. Who will rise next?
Aug 17, 2025 · 5:04 PM UTC