Silicon Valley Is Quietly Running on Chinese AI

Opening

Dear reader, back in October last year, Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky said something in a Bloomberg interview. About Alibaba’s Qwen model, he said it was “really good, fast, and cheap.” Coming from someone with a personal friendship with Sam Altman, saying this out loud in public tells you the mood in Silicon Valley has shifted quite a bit.

And it’s not just Alibaba’s Qwen. MiniMax and Kimi, both started as scrappy startups, are in the mix too, along with DeepSeek. Even in the recent OpenClaw craze, the most frequently chosen models turned out to be Chinese models.

NBC News actually conducted anonymous interviews with 15 AI startup founders, ML engineers, and investors, and most of them said they were already deploying Chinese AI models in production—because of cost. But this isn’t simply a story about “using the cheap option.” Today I want to dig into what this phenomenon structurally means.

What the numbers tell us: the truth behind 80%

A figure that Martin Casado, general partner at a16z (Andreessen Horowitz), mentioned in an interview with The Economist shook the industry. “80% of the open-source-based startups pitching us are using Chinese models,” he said.

But there’s context worth flagging here. Casado himself later clarified that this 80% is the share among startups that use open-source models specifically. Since the share of all startups using open source is roughly 20-30%, the real figure works out to about 16-24% of all startups using Chinese open-source models. Still, considering this was close to 0% just a year ago, the speed of this shift is the real story.

Hugging Face download data makes this trend even clearer. Alibaba’s Qwen series overtook Meta’s Llama in cumulative 2025 downloads, and according to MIT research, total downloads of Chinese open-source models have now surpassed American models. In particular, Qwen-based derivative models account for over 40% of new language models on Hugging Face, while Llama-based ones have fallen to around 15%. This means Qwen has effectively become the default base model for global open-source AI.