Former Google chief Eric Schmidt has warned that western countries need to focus on building open-source artificial intelligence models or risk losing out to China in the global race to develop the cutting-edge technology.
The warning comes after Chinese start-up DeepSeek shocked the world last month with the launch of R1, its powerful-reasoning open large language model, which was built in a more efficient way than its US rivals such as OpenAI.
Schmidt, who has become a significant tech investor and philanthropist, said the majority of the top US LLMs are closed — meaning not freely accessible to all — which includes Google’s Gemini, Anthropic’s Claude and OpenAI’s GPT-4, with the exception being Meta’s Llama.