Are Chinese open-source models eating into OpenAI and Anthropic's profits? Silicon Valley entrepreneur Xiaoyin Qu suggests: OpenAI and Anthropic are pouring massive funds into training the latest models, but the real money isn’t in the model layer! In the AI industry, compute power, energy, and applications are the true profit drivers, while the model layer is actually the thinnest slice of value. She points out that the emergence of Chinese open-source models has disrupted the oligopoly that U.S. tech giants might have formed: Without competition from these free models, OpenAI and Anthropic could have maintained a highly profitable monopoly. But now, even after burning billions of dollars and recruiting top talent to develop cutting-edge models, the commercial returns are still being siphoned off by the compute and application layers. This perspective has sparked diverse opinions among AI professionals.