Exactly, Chinese companies are playing the long game by releasing open models which then end up becoming the standard everyone is building stuff on top of. For example, here’s Airbnb saying they use Qwen because OpenAI is just not competitive:

“We’re relying a lot on Alibaba’s Qwen model. It’s very good. It’s also fast and cheap,” he said. “We use OpenAI’s latest models, but we typically don’t use them that much in production because there are faster and cheaper models.”