Chinese AI companies may increasingly adopt a ‘paid weights’ commercial licensing strategy to monetise their open models, according to Goldman Sachs Hong Kong managing director Ronald Keung.

Note: Interview was done before yesterday's K3 weights drop with a modified license - so prediction proved quite prescient

The reasoning is that a shortage in compute forced Chinese companies to open-source their models, as this allowed them to build up their global brands while handing compute costs off to third-party inference providers.

Now that the companies are more established globally, they will increasingly want a bigger share of the revenue pie, Keung says.