Back to the trend of the day: China's DeepSeek gives away the engine that runs its AI, free

Poly Rating · from the trend of the day

DeepSeek Open Source Inference Engine: Top 10 Chinese Labs

DeepSeek now gives away its serving engine as well as its weights, takes about a quarter of OpenRouter's text requests, and charges $0.60 per million output tokens for V4.1 Flash off-peak, against $15 for Moonshot's Kimi K3.

No. 1: DeepSeek
10 places
Current as of October 21, 2026, 01:15 EDT

01Final list

The leading AIs each built their own list of ten independently. Here is one result that is easy to check: every place has a reason, a source, and the list of AIs that included it.

Order: from most to least AI agreement.

A bright badge means this AI put the entry on its list. A dim badge means it did not.

1
DeepSeek
Leads gateway use with 24.4% of OpenRouter text requests (week of Oct 12). MIT weights plus the Apache-2.0 DeepInfer engine. Flagship Flash costs $0.15/$0.60 off-peak.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Meta.
In their lists: Claude: 1 · ChatGPT: 1 · Grok: 1 · Gemini: 1 · Kimi: 1 · Wenxin: 1
What each AI noted 6
- Claudeplace 1
  The only lab here that opened weights under MIT and then, on Oct 20, 2026, the serving engine too (DeepInfer), at $0.14/$0.28 per million tokens for V4 Flash.
- ChatGPTplace 1
  24.4% of OpenRouter text requests in the latest complete week; its leading model also processed 124T tokens over the trailing month.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 1
  The only lab here that published both the model and the engine: one cluster, DeepSeek says, already serves 155 trillion tokens a day.
- Geminiplace 1
  Shattered enterprise lock-in by gifting DeepInfer free under Apache 2.0 while processing 155 trillion tokens a day at $0.14 per million input tokens.
  Source ↗
- Kimiplace 1
  The only lab that open-sources its serving engine too: DeepInfer runs 155 trillion tokens a day on one cluster while V4.1 Flash leads OpenRouter with 25.6T tokens in a week.
- Wenxinplace 1
  Gave away the engine and the weights — then powered 155 trillion tokens a day on its own servers
6 AIs put it here
Source ↗
2
Alibaba Qwen
Widest open-weight reach: 151,448 Hugging Face derivatives (Alibaba claims 300k+). Yet only 5.3% of OpenRouter requests, and the Max flagship costs $2/$6.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Meta.
In their lists: Claude: 2 · ChatGPT: 3 · Grok: 4 · Gemini: 2 · Kimi: 2 · Wenxin: 2
What each AI noted 6
- Claudeplace 2
  2.045 billion Hugging Face downloads in 2026 and 151,448 derivatives, 4.7 times Llama's count, yet its top models stay proprietary.
  Source ↗
- ChatGPTplace 3
  At 5.3% of OpenRouter requests, Qwen trails the two leaders, while its many model variants give developers unusually broad weight choice.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 4
  151,000-plus derivative models this summer, and only 1.8% of the OpenRouter snapshot — the weights travel further than the API bill.
  Source ↗
- Geminiplace 2
  Maintains the largest open-weight lineage on earth with over 100,000 Hugging Face derivative models spanning 0.5B to 110B+ parameters.
- Kimiplace 2
  151,448 derivative models - 2.6x Meta's - make Qwen the de facto base layer of open AI, even though its own API prices sit at the premium end ($2/$6 flagship).
- Wenxinplace 2
  Open-weights family so wide it beats most labs on download counts — and adds its own serving engine
  Source ↗
6 AIs put it here
Source ↗
3
Tencent Hunyuan (Hy4)
Hy4 preview has 770B Apache-2.0 weights and drew 35.3T OpenRouter tokens in a month. Its $0.834/$2.501 price comes from one comparison, and Ascend support is experimental.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Meta.
In their lists: Claude: 7 · ChatGPT: 5 · Grok: 5 · Gemini: 10 · Kimi: 5 · Wenxin: 7
What each AI noted 6
- Claudeplace 7
  Hy3 (295B total, about 21B active) is Apache 2.0 with no geographic restrictions, at $0.14/$0.56 on a third-party host.
  Source ↗
- ChatGPTplace 5
  Hy4 Preview handled 35.3T tokens in a month on OpenRouter, despite the gateway not listing Tencent among its top author-share rows.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 5
  Seventh-biggest OpenRouter provider this week, with an Apache-2.0 preview that still costs about $2.50 to answer a million tokens.
  Source ↗
- Geminiplace 10
  Backed by WeChat's massive distributed infrastructure, releasing Hunyuan-Large weights with bilingual long-context support under Apache 2.0.
- Kimiplace 5
  Hy4 preview ships 770B Apache-2.0 weights, a 1M context and ready-made vLLM + SGLang speculative-decoding recipes - the most batteries-included open flagship of 2026.
  Source ↗
- Wenxinplace 7
  WeChat giant's Hunyuan-DiT went viral in image gen — its LLMs stayed more closed and pricier
6 AIs put it here
Source ↗
More about the top three ↓
4
MiniMax
M3 is cheap at $0.30/$1.20. But a free Flash model's 13.7% of one day's top 20 shrinks to 1.59% of the week, and the licence adds a $20M revenue gate.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Meta.
In their lists: Claude: 5 · ChatGPT: 7 · Grok: 7 · Gemini: 5 · Kimi: 6 · Wenxin: 8
What each AI noted 6
- Claudeplace 5
  The cheapest of the big three Chinese coding favourites at $0.30/$1.20, but its newest licence is the most contested.
  Source ↗
- ChatGPTplace 7
  MiniMax’s new free Flash model was trending, but a trending rank is not a durable share-of-use measure.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 7
  A free Flash model took 13.7% of one day's top 20, then the lab's whole week was 1.59%.
- Geminiplace 5
  Captured a fast-growing developer niche across autonomous agents by pricing low-latency MoE models under $0.15 per million tokens.
  Source ↗
- Kimiplace 6
  M3 serves a 1M context at $0.30/$1.20 - but the Community License's mandatory 'Built with MiniMax M3' badge and $20M revenue gate make it the least free 'open' weights in the top ranks.
- Wenxinplace 8
  Voice-AI pioneer open-sourced MiniMax-Text-01 — cheap but ecosystem still small
6 AIs put it here
Source ↗
5
Moonshot AI (Kimi)
The biggest open weights (2.8T) but the priciest flagship at $3/$15, which keeps Kimi K3 near 1% of OpenRouter's top-20 tokens. Custom licence above $20M revenue.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Meta.
In their lists: Claude: 6 · ChatGPT: 6 · Grok: 8 · Gemini: 6 · Kimi: 7 · Wenxin: 9
What each AI noted 6
- Claudeplace 6
  The priciest flagship in the group ($3/$15, or $2.60/$13 on OpenRouter), with only 1.2% of top-20 tokens.
- ChatGPTplace 6
  A substantial global developer presence is reported, but the available OpenRouter author-share excerpt does not quantify Kimi separately.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 8
  The largest open weight file on the list, 2.8 trillion parameters, and the bill is $15 per million output tokens.
  Source ↗
- Geminiplace 6
  Pioneered commercial million-token long-context interfaces with Kimi, commanding premium API pricing due to agentic reasoning strength.
- Kimiplace 7
  K3 opens a 2.8T-parameter flagship in MXFP4 - then charges frontier prices ($3/$15) that cap it at 1.2% of OpenRouter tokens despite the sgl-npu port.
  Source ↗
- Wenxinplace 9
  Long-context champion released 1M-token model open — but only one model, and it's pricey
6 AIs put it here
Source ↗
6
Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)
Second on OpenRouter (12.2% of requests, 11.9% of tracked tokens) and named in vLLM Ascend's October release. The full GLM-5.3 still costs $4.40 per million output tokens.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Meta.
In their lists: Claude: 3 · ChatGPT: 2 · Grok: 2 · Gemini: 3 · Kimi: 3 · Wenxin: 4
What each AI noted 6
- Claudeplace 3
  MIT-licensed weights with a 1.5 TB BF16 checkpoint, and GLM 5.3 Flash sits at $0.15/$0.50.
  Source ↗
- ChatGPTplace 2
  Its GLM 5.3 Flash took 12.2% of OpenRouter requests, while the lab’s total remained half DeepSeek’s gateway share.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 2
  Second on the gateway, and the 11 Oct Ascend release names GLM-5.3 beside DeepSeek — the flagship still bills $4.40 per million output tokens.
  Source ↗
- Geminiplace 3
  Transitioned from Tsinghua University academic roots to driving enterprise token volumes on GLM-5 alongside Western frontier leaders.
- Kimiplace 3
  GLM 5.3 Flash is OpenRouter's #3 model at 9.73T tokens a week while undercutting everyone at $0.15/$0.50 - with a Huawei Ascend support matrix no Western lab matches.
- Wenxinplace 4
  Began as Tsinghua lab project — now ships GLM-4 open-weight on par with GPT-4 class for less
6 AIs put it here
Source ↗
7
StepFun
Step 5 Preview weights (600B, custom licence) arrived Oct 14–16 at $1/$2.70. One tracker gives StepFun 5.32% of OpenRouter tokens, a figure from that single source.
Included it: ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Claude, Meta.
In their lists: ChatGPT: 10 · Grok: 6 · Gemini: 9 · Kimi: 8 · Wenxin: 10
What each AI noted 5
- ChatGPTplace 10
  Included as a global API-facing Chinese lab, but public comparable usage and stack measurements are too thin to justify a higher placement.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 6
  Weights sat in a drawer for a month: the API opened 20 Sep, the 600B files followed on 14 Oct, at $1 / $2.70.
- Geminiplace 9
  Rose rapidly in autonomous agent benchmarks with Step-2, deploying billion-parameter multimodal architectures at aggressive developer discounts.
- Kimiplace 8
  Step 5 Preview arrived Oct 16 with 600B open weights at $1.00/$2.70 - and experimental Huawei Ascend 950 support in vLLM-Ascend on day one.
- Wenxinplace 10
  Tiny but scrappy: Step-2-16k is free-to-use on API — weights open, engine not
5 AIs put it here
Source ↗
8
Baidu ERNIE
Ten ERNIE 4.5 models under Apache 2.0 plus its own open FastDeploy server. The flagship ERNIE 5.0 stays closed, and ERNIE is only experimental on vLLM Ascend.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin. Did not include: Meta, Grok.
In their lists: Claude: 9 · ChatGPT: 8 · Gemini: 7 · Kimi: 9 · Wenxin: 5
What each AI noted 5
- Claudeplace 9
  ERNIE 5.0 costs $0.60/$2.10, but one source calls it API-only while another says Baidu opens weights 'to some extent'.
  Source ↗
- ChatGPTplace 8
  Baidu’s ERNIE family has an Ascend path, but the available gateway evidence does not support placing it with the top measured users.
  Source ↗
- Geminiplace 7
  Couples Ernie 4.0 models directly to the domestic PaddlePaddle ecosystem, providing a vertically integrated alternative to CUDA.
- Kimiplace 9
  The widest fully-open family - ten Apache-2.0 models up to 424B plus open ERNIEKit and FastDeploy toolkits - yet the flagship ERNIE 5.0 itself stays closed.
  Source ↗
- Wenxinplace 5
  China's biggest search firm open-sourced ERNIE-4.5 — but license walls kept it from true openness
  Source ↗
5 AIs put it here
Source ↗
9
Xiaomi MiMo
MIT weights and one of the cheapest flagships ($0.435/$0.87 for Pro). It has 7.8% of tracked OpenRouter tokens but only 2.4% of requests: two units, two stories.
Included it: Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Kimi. Did not include: Meta, Gemini, Wenxin.
In their lists: Claude: 4 · ChatGPT: 4 · Grok: 3 · Kimi: 4
What each AI noted 4
- Claudeplace 4
  MiMo-V2.6-Flash held 7.1% of top-20 OpenRouter tokens, and the Pro model costs $0.435/$0.87.
  Source ↗
- ChatGPTplace 4
  MiMo had 2.4% of gateway requests, but its newest Flash model logged 37.8T monthly tokens—evidence that gateway share and individual-model volume tell different stories.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 3
  MIT weights, a 46 on the open-model index, and $0.87 per million output — with no engine of its own next to DeepInfer.
  Source ↗
- Kimiplace 4
  The cheapest serious flagship API on Earth - $0.14 in / $0.28 out per million, 1M context billed at the flat rate - and MiMo-V2.6-Flash still grew +75% to 9.63T OpenRouter tokens in a week.
  Source ↗
4 AIs put it here
Source ↗
10
Meituan LongCat
LongCat-2.0 has 1.6T parameters under MIT and, by Meituan's account, was trained on Chinese chips. The $0.75/$2.95 price is unverified, and no OpenRouter share is reported.
Included it: Claude, Grok. Did not include: ChatGPT, Meta, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin.
In their lists: Claude: 8 · Grok: 9
What each AI noted 2
- Claudeplace 8
  A 1.6T-parameter model under MIT, with an API reported at $0.75/$2.95.
  Source ↗
- Grokplace 9
  A delivery company published a 1.6T MIT model and says it trained the run on 50,000 Chinese chips, not Nvidia.
2 AIs put it here
Source ↗

02More about the top three

The ranking is above. Here is more about the three places at the top: what they are, why they are here, and what is worth knowing.

Places 1 and 2 are compared by share of OpenRouter text requests, but place 3 only has a token count for one month (35.3T), so the three are not measured quite the same way.

1DeepSeek

No. 1 — DeepSeek. On the lists of 6 of 7 AIs; median place there: 1. It leads OpenRouter use and is the only lab giving away both its model weights and its serving engine.

DeepSeek · MIT · Wikimedia Commons

Did you know

A peer-reviewed Nature article said DeepSeek's R1 reasoning model cost US$294,000 to train, using 512 Nvidia H800 chips for 80 hours. That is tiny for a big AI model, though critics say the figure leaves out much of the spending.
Source ↗

What it is: Chinese lab that gives away MIT-licensed weights and the Apache-2.0 DeepInfer serving engine.
Its edge: Biggest OpenRouter share, and the only one of the three releasing weights and engine.
Who it suits: Suits teams wanting cheap Flash API use; hard for home users, since big weights need heavy hardware.

OpenRouter text request share24.4% of OpenRouter requests

Wikipedia · Wikidata

Why it is here

DeepSeek had 24.4% of OpenRouter text requests in the week beginning Oct 12, 2026, the highest share listed. OpenRouter says its rankings measure traffic sent through its gateway. — (voice only)
Source ↗
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash processed 125T tokens on OpenRouter over the 30 days shown, up 502% from the previous 30 days. — (voice only)
Source ↗

Keep in mind

Running it at home is hard. One guide says V4-Pro's full weights exceed 800GB, so you need big hardware or heavy compression. Most people use the API instead.
Source ↗
In an early Reddit thread, users said tools like llama.cpp lacked support and consumer-GPU kernels were missing. One user found Flash disappointing for coding on the web version. This was early May, so it may have changed.
Source ↗

Where to go further

Open the official price list and find the Flash model. Check the peak and off-peak hours first, because the same request can cost different amounts at different times of day.
Source ↗

Video: How A Chinese Villager Shook Silicon Valley [DeepSeek Founder] · ColdFusion

Compare the top three ↓

2Alibaba Qwen

No. 2 — Alibaba Qwen. On the lists of 6 of 7 AIs; median place there: 2. Its open models are the base for far more derivatives than Meta's, but few developers use its API.

Did you know

Hugging Face counts 151,448 models built on Qwen, which the report says is 2.6 times Meta's whole footprint there. Alibaba claims more than 300,000, about double the count Hugging Face recorded.
Source ↗ ✓ confirmed by several AIs

What it is: Alibaba's open-weight model family, with a paid API for its top Max tier.
Its edge: Widest open-weight reach: 151,448 Hugging Face derivatives, far above the other two.
Who it suits: Suits builders who want many model sizes to adapt; not those wanting the top model's weights.

OpenRouter text request share5.3% of OpenRouter requests

Why it is here

Qwen had 5.3% of OpenRouter text requests in the week beginning Oct 12, 2026—less than DeepSeek’s 24.4%. — (voice only)
Source ↗

History

In August 2023, Alibaba published the first Qwen and Qwen Chat open-weight models. It made their code, weights, and documentation freely available, letting researchers and businesses build on them. — Alibaba Group
Source ↗

Keep in mind

Reports about Qwen 3.8-Max openness conflict. One reader flagged a license they read as banning use in the USA, EU, UK and Korea. Check the license before building on it.
Source ↗

What people say

Open-sourcing now seems more like a marketing strategy — r/LocalLLaMA commenter, quoted by DEV Community (about Qwen3-Max-Preview being c
Source ↗

Where to go further

Open the Qwen page on Hugging Face and start with the model list. Look at the numbers beside each model, which seem to show downloads, and see how many models were built on top of Qwen.
Source ↗

Compare the top three ↓

3Tencent Hunyuan (Hy4)

No. 3 — Tencent Hunyuan (Hy4). On the lists of 6 of 7 AIs; median place there: 6. It ships big Apache-2.0 open weights with ready-made serving recipes and solid token use, but it is a preview and pricey.

Did you know

Tencent's Hy4-preview has 770 billion parameters, but only 49 billion work on each token, and it reads over one million tokens of context. Its quality scores come from Tencent's own self-designed rubric, so they are self-reported.
Source ↗ ✓ confirmed by several AIs

What it is: Tencent's Hy4 preview, a 770B-parameter model with open Apache-2.0 weights.
Its edge: Ships ready-made vLLM and SGLang serving recipes and a 1M-token context.
Who it suits: Suits teams with serious hardware who want to test it; not casual users or anyone needing a finished model.

OpenRouter text request share35.3T OpenRouter tokens/month

Wikipedia · Wikidata

History

In September 2023, Tencent first offered Hunyuan to Chinese businesses through Tencent Cloud APIs. The launch also brought the model into 50 Tencent products, including Tencent Meeting and Tencent Docs. — Tencent
Source ↗

Keep in mind

Its lead is small and comes from Tencent's own test: 2.99 against Kimi K3's 2.94. The 770B weights need heavy hardware; even a compressed Q4 version needs roughly a 512 GB machine.
Source ↗

What people say

The amount of people who can drop $5-10k to run these locally is vanishingly small. — u/jazir55
Source ↗

Where to go further

Read the model card notes first. They say Hy4 is an early version that can reason too long on hard tasks and over-check its own work. Then look at the Apache-2.0 license and the 770B size.
Source ↗

Compare the top three ↓

The top three side by side

	DeepSeek	Alibaba Qwen	Tencent Hunyuan (Hy4)
In the AIs' lists	6 / 7	6 / 7	6 / 7
OpenRouter text request share	24.4% of OpenRouter requests	5.3% of OpenRouter requests	35.3T OpenRouter tokens/month
Put first by	Claude, ChatGPT, Grok, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin	—	—

Places with the same number of AIs are ordered by their average place in the AIs' own lists.

03Worth knowing

What the AIs noticed while building the list.

On OpenRouter, Chinese labs went from 7% of known-developer tokens in the first week of 2025 to 71% in the week ending 18 Oct 2026.

Noticed by:

Included it: Grok. Did not include: Claude, ChatGPT, Meta, Gemini, Kimi, Wenxin.

01Final list

DeepSeek

Alibaba Qwen

Tencent Hunyuan (Hy4)

MiniMax

Moonshot AI (Kimi)

Z.ai (Zhipu GLM)

StepFun

Baidu ERNIE

Xiaomi MiMo

Meituan LongCat

02More about the top three

1DeepSeek

Did you know

2Alibaba Qwen

Did you know

3Tencent Hunyuan (Hy4)

Did you know

The top three side by side

More ratings

03Worth knowing

04Questions people ask

05How we counted

1The question

2Why this topic

3Where it applies

4What we looked at

5Who ranked

6How the places were set

06Each AI's own list

What Claude noticed

What ChatGPT noticed

What Gemini noticed

What Kimi noticed

What Wenxin noticed