Chinese AI models are rapidly narrowing performance gaps with leading Western models while cutting inference costs to as little as one-hundredth, an analysis said. The focus is shifting from top benchmark scores to who can deploy high-performance AI cheaply and at scale. Benchmark results still show U.S. firms ahead, but Chinese models are close. Cost and open-weight strategies are boosting adoption, though political constraints and bias concerns persist.

Upstage unveiled its open-weight large language model \'Solar Open 2\' optimised for agent task execution and released the model weights on Hugging Face. Developed through a government sovereign AI foundation model project, it uses a mixture-of-experts design with 250 billion parameters and activates 15 billion in use. Upstage said it outperformed rival models on multiple benchmarks and plans broader deployments and AX services across industries.