One Year Since the “DeepSeek Moment”

This is the first blog in a series that will examine China’s open source community’s historical advancements in the past year and its reverberations in shaping the entire ecosystem. Much of 2025’s progress can be traced back to January’s “DeepSeek Moment”, when Hangzhou-based AI company DeepSeek released their R-1 model.

The first blog addresses strategic changes and the explosion of new open models and open source players. The second covers architectural and hardware choices largely by Chinese companies made in the wake of a growing open ecosystem, available here. The third analyzes prominent organizations’ trajectories and the future of the global open source ecosystem, available here.

For AI researchers and developers contributing to and relying on the open source ecosystem and for policymakers understanding the rapidly changing environment, there has never been a better time to build and release open models and artifacts, as proven by the past year’s immense growth catalyzed by DeepSeek. Notably, geopolitics has driven adoption; while models developed in China have been dominating across metrics throughout 2025 and new players leapfrogging each other, Western AI communities are seeking commercially deployable alternatives. 

The Seeds of China’s Organic Open Source AI Ecosystem

Before R1, China’s AI industry was still largely centered on closed models. Open models had existed for years, but they were mostly confined to research communities or used only in niche scenarios such as privacy-sensitive applications. For most companies, they were not the default choice. Compute resources were tight, and whether to “open or close” was a subject of debate.

One year after the release of R1, what we see emerging is not only a collection of new models, but also a growing organic open source AI ecosystem.

DeepSeek R1: A Turning Point

But R1’s real significance was not whether it was the strongest model at the time, its importance lay in how it lowered three barriers.