The next leg of the AI race is on, and has expanded beyond the usual players, such as OpenAI, Google, Meta, and Microsoft. In addition to the dominance of the tech giants, more open-source options have now taken to the spotlight with a new focus in the AI arena.
Various brands, such as DeepSeek, Alibaba, and Baidu, have demonstrated that AI functions can be developed and executed at a fraction of the cost. They have also navigated securing solid business partnerships and deciding or continuing to provide AI products to consumers as free or low-cost, open source models, while larger companies double down on a proprietary, for-profit trajectory, hiding their best features behind a paywall.
The latest models, such as DeepSeek’s R1, Alibaba’s Qwen2.5-VL, and Baidu’s Ernie 4.5 have been compared to the top models such as OpenAI’s 4o or GPT-4.5 models. Meanwhile, their codes are easily accessible at repositories, such as GitHub or Huggingface for developers to use on unique applications.
Learn more about these open source AI products and consider if you’d be interested in making a switch from a more traditional app.
DeepSeek
DeepSeek, short for Hangzhou DeepSeek Artificial Intelligence Basic Technology Research Co., Ltd., is a Chinese AI startup that gained international attention after its AI models proved to be formidable in quality to those of well-established brands in the industry, including OpenAI, Google, Meta, Microsoft, and others. The company showcased AI models developed in a fraction of the time and operating cost of competitors’ models.
The young company has been around since April 2023, an offshoot of the parent company High-Flyer, but has developed several AI models. These include the original DeepSeek-LLM, DeepSeek-Math, DeepSeek V2, and DeepSeek V3– the last of which was announced in November 2024 and was already gaining industry attention. The brand announced its DeepSeek-R1 and DeepSeek-R1-Zero reasoning models in January 2025, which took the AI industry by storm with comparisons to OpenAI’s GPT-4 and o1 models. The infamous introduction affected stock prices, made competitors rethink business strategies, and caused security concerns among government entities.
DeepSeek was released under the MIT License, which indicates it is as open as it can be without being 100% open source. The company calls its AI models “open weight.” Still, they are available on the GitHub repository for users to download and develop.
DeepSeek is a chatbot-style AI tool that is available in web-based format as well as through iOS and Android mobile applications. Since gaining notoriety, the company has partnered with several companies, including Lenovo, Tencent, Alibaba, and Baidu, among others, to use its AI models.
Alibaba Qwen
Alibaba Qwen, short for Tongyi Qianwen, a large language model family, is among the top 10 open-source models in the world. Alibaba itself is a notable Chinese e-commerce brand. The company announced its first model as a beta in April 2023, which quickly became popular in the AI space as it officially released models as open source throughout the year.
Subsequent models have been released as either partially or fully open source, including Qwen 2, Qwen-VL2, Qwen-vl-max, Qwen-Audio, and Qwen2-Math. The company’s most recent models include Qwen 2.5-Max, which was announced in January 2025, and Qwen2.5-VL, which was announced in March, marketing them as more powerful than rival models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o, DeepSeek-V3, and Meta’s Llama-3.1-405 B LLMs.
The original Qwen model was based on Meta’s Llama LLM– another open-source model, modified to suit Alibaba’s processes. Future models have been released under the Apache 2.0 License and can be found at the GitHub and Huggingface repositories.
Qwen is a chatbot-style AI tool that is available in web-based format as well as through iOS and Android mobile applications. Since its inception, over 90,000 independent models have been developed based on Qwen’s open-source code.
Baidu Ernie bot
The Ernie Bot, short for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration, is a chatbot developed by Baidu, a well-known Chinese internet brand. While Baidu has been developing its ERNIE model since 2019, it first released the Ernie 3.0 LLM in March 2023.
Since then, it released Ernie 3.5 in June 2023 and Ernie 4.0 in October 2023. The 4.0 model was reserved for Baidu’s subscription-based products, while the 3.5 model was used for the brand’s free chatbot.
Currently, the Ernie model is not open source; however, the brand plans to soon make it more available to the public in response to increasing competition in the AI industry, as well as due to rapidly reducing production costs.
Baidu released its Ernie 4.5 LLM, and Ernie X1 reasoning model in mid-March, which has been compared to OpenAI’s GPT-4.5 and DeepSeek R1, respectively. The brand has plans to make its models open source on June 30. Additionally, the company announced that its chatbot will be free to all users as of April 1. A future model, Ernie 5 is expected to be released during the second half of 2025, similarly being open source and free to use.
Ernie is a chatbot-style AI tool that is available in web-based format as well as through iOS and Android mobile applications. Since its inception, Ernie has been used as the model for the AI integration on an international version of the Samsung Galaxy S24 series.