In African tech hubs, developers are picking China’s cheap, freely available artificial intelligence models over more powerful U.S. ones.
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Chinese “open-source” models account for roughly half of total A.I. use on OpenRouter, a service with 400 A.I. models for users to choose from, up from less than 25 percent a year ago, according to a New York Times analysis of data from eight million customers. Chinese models are also 19 of the 25 most downloaded open-source systems on Hugging Face, another A.I. database.