In addition to Baidu, other Chinese tech giants such as Alibaba Group and Tencent have increasingly been providing their AI offerings for free and are making more models open source.
For example, Alibaba Cloud said last month it was open-sourcing its AI models for video generation, while Tencent reportedly released five new open-source models earlier this month with the ability to convert text and images into 3D visuals.
Smaller players are also furthering the trend. ManusAI, a Chinese AI firm that recently unveiled an AI agent that claims to outperform OpenAI's Deep Research, has said it would shift towards open source.