He said: “It stopped being Chinese the minute it was released on Hugging Face and no one can put the open source genie back in the bottle — not even the US government."

Shortly after DeepSeek made waves, Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (BAAI) launched OpenSeek, an open-weight sequel aiming to beat DeepSeek at its own game and rally “the global open source communities to drive collaborative innovation in algorithms, data, and systems.” Naturally, the US did what it does and slapped BAAI onto its naughty list.

Asay isn’t buying the geopolitical hand-wringing. The pace and scale of community-driven development mean attempts at control are laughably outdated.

“DeepSeek didn’t just have a moment. It’s now very much a movement,” he said.

Even Hugging Face, which Asay reminds us is just “one company, just one platform,” is trying to reverse engineer DeepSeek’s R1 model and spread it far and wide. That platform now enables hundreds of thousands of devs pushing innovation in a way “unmatched even by the most agile corporate labs.”

OpenAI, he says — and not for the first time — is going the wrong way. While the Microsoft lapdog mouths vague open source ambitions, it still hasn’t coughed up anything resembling DeepSeek or OpenSeek. “They’re attempting to dam an ocean,” Asay quips.

Asay said: “It’s Linux all over again. One passionate start becomes a movement, then infrastructure, then a global standard. The key difference is that this time it’s happening in months, not decades."