In open-weight AI, America is the one playing catch-up

According to Village's LLM Atlas, which scores 857 models on a single capability scale, China's best open-weight models have led America's every day since September 2024, when Meta's Llama 3.1 405B last matched Alibaba's Qwen2.5. The 12 record-setting US open models since 2025 arrived a median of 3.3 months after a Chinese open model reached the same score, and the latest gap stood at 7 points on October 24 after DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash and Moonshot's Kimi K3.1 Pro widened a lead Meta's Muse Spark Open had cut to 2.9 points. Both countries' open models still trail the best closed models, by about five months for China and nine for America.