For the last half-decade, the prevailing narrative in Silicon Valley has been one of absolute, unassailable dominance. The United States possesses the GPUs, the capital, and the talent. Everyone else is merely playing catch-up, drafting behind the aerodynamic wake of OpenAI and Google. That narrative just hit a wall.

A rigorous new study by researchers at MIT, Hugging Face, and others has analyzed the complete history of model downloads—2.2 billion of them—to trace where the actual power lies in the ecosystem. The results are not just surprising. They represent a fundamental inversion of the status quo.

According to the data, China has officially overtaken the United States in the global market share of open model downloads. In the last year alone, Chinese organizations captured 17.1% of the download market, surpassing the US share of 15.8%. — Read More