Weight Models Aren’t Enough. We Need Truly Open Source AI Models for Science and Society.

Chinese open-weight models have made stunning progress in recent months, with offerings from companies like DeepSeek and Alibaba closing the performance gap with American counterparts. Stanford HAI’s own AI Index found the U.S.-China performance gap narrowing to a few percentage points last year. Two new Chinese models narrow this gap even more. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3, a 2.8-trillion-parameter model with a million-token context window featuring 2.4 trillion parameters, and Alibaba’s Qwen3.8-Max, featuring 2.4 trillion parameters, are the most powerful open-weight models yet, edging closer in the rankings to the highest-performing American models. These new models demonstrate big improvements in open-weight…