DeepSeek may have originated in China, but it stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face with an accompanying paper detailing its development. Soon after, a range of developers, including the Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI), scrambled to replicate DeepSeek’s success but this time as open source software. BAAI, for its part, launched OpenSeek, an ambitious effort to take DeepSeek’s open-weight models and create a project that surpasses DeepSeek while uniting “the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems.” If that sounds cool to you, it didn’t to the U.S. government, which promptly put BAAI on its “baddie” list. Someone needs to remind U.S. (and global) policymakers that no single country, company, or government can contain community-driven open source.
The moment that keeps on going
It’s increasingly common in AI circles to refer to the “DeepSeek moment,” but calling it a moment fundamentally misunderstands its significance. DeepSeek didn’t just have a moment. It’s now very much a movement, one that will frustrate all efforts to contain it. DeepSeek, and the open source AI ecosystem surrounding it, has rapidly evolved from a brief snapshot of technological brilliance into something much bigger—and much harder to stop. Tens of thousands of developers, from seasoned researchers to passionate hobbyists, are now working on enhancing, tuning, and extending these open source models in ways no centralized entity could manage alone.
For example, it’s perhaps not surprising that Hugging Face is actively attempting to reverse engineer and publicly disseminate DeepSeek’s R1 model. Hugging Face, while important, is just one company, just one platform. But Hugging Face has attracted hundreds of thousands of developers who actively contribute to, adapt, and build on open source models, driving AI innovation at a speed and scale unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs.
