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China Just Responded to America’s Beam AI With 2 Powerful Open-Source Models
China’s Secret AI Model “Space Bunny” And DeepSeek 1017
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The open model race used to move in months.
Now it moves in days.
In early October, an American startup announced a model built to take on Chinese open models directly.
On October 5, Reflection AI introduced Beam. Former DeepMind researchers founded the startup, and it presents itself as America’s answer to Chinese open source AI.
On October 16, the weights went public on Hugging Face under the Apache 2.0 license. That license is one of the most business friendly in AI.
For a moment, it looked like the West had finally closed the open model gap.
Less than two weeks later, two Chinese labs answered with releases that changed how cheap a capable AI model can be.
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017
On October 17, DeepSeek released DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017.
