Silicon Valley Startups Turn to Chinese Models Like DeepSeek and Qwen

A growing number of Silicon Valley startups are switching from homegrown or US frontier AI models to cheaper Chinese alternatives such as DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen and Moonshot's Kimi. The shift is driven by the climbing cost of training and inference, with founders drawn to models that cut spending without sacrificing much performance and that ship as open weights they can freely customize.