Chinese tech giants Baidu and Huawei both entered the open-source arena with significant AI models this week, after the success of start-up DeepSeek drew more attention to open-source AI.

Baidu made its flagship Ernie 4.5 models available for download on open-source AI site Hugging Face, while Huawei open-sourced two of its Pangu AI models, saying they match the world’s leading models in performance.

Baidu said 10 variants of Ernie 4.5 would be available on Hugging Face, ranging from 300 million parameter lightweight models to the largest 424 billion parameter versions.

Open-source shift

Baidu said its 300B Ernie 4.5 model outperformed DeepSeek’s V3, which is more than twice the size of the Ernie model.

Baidu was one of the first major Chinese tech firms to develop a large language model-based chatbot following the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022, but more recently has faced increasing competition in China’s crowded AI market.

Other major Chinese tech firms have found success with open-source models, including Alibaba, whose Qwen models are the most popular open-source offerings amongst developers.

Huawei’s AI offerings are significant in that they form part of a broader ecosystem that includes Ascend AI chips, considered the closest equivalent in China to Nvidia’s processors, which are banned from export to China under US law.

Huawei has said its Ascend ecosystem strategy should help speed the adoption of AI across “thousands of industries”.

While other companies have offered general-purpose AI models, Huawei has focused on specialised models for sectors such as government, finance and manufacturing.

Medical AI

As well as open-sourcing the Pangu models, Huawei said on Monday that it was working with Ruijin Hospital, an affiliate of Shanghai Jiao Tong University School of Medicine, to open-source a pathology model, providing easier access for smaller hospitals and potentially leading to faster and more accurate cancer diagnoses across China.

The RuiPath model has been trained on more than one million of Ruijin Hospital’s high-quality digital pathology slide images for seven common cancers and was fine-tuned using Huawei’s AI tools, the hospital said.

Shanghai-based MiniMax and Beijing-based Moonshot AI, two major Chinese AI start-ups, have also started sharing more of their research work.