One Year Since the “DeepSeek Moment”

The release of the DeepSeek R1 model marked a significant turning point for China's open-source AI ecosystem, shifting the industry from closed models toward open development. This event lowered technical, adoption, and psychological barriers by making advanced reasoning an accessible engineering asset through an open license and shared training methods. Consequently, companies began integrating and fine-tuning the model for production, and the Chinese AI community gained significant global attention. In the year following, established companies like Baidu and ByteDance, along with new players, dramatically increased their open-source contributions, fueling an explosion of new, highly performant models.