I don't quite understand what is going in China; why are these private companies (Deepseek, Alibaba, Moonshot, Bytedance) releasing models, which have been very costly to develop, for free? Is there some of sort of government mandate behind this. I understand it from a societal perspective where you want the value created by artificial intelligence to be as high possible; and you do that by dispersing it across as many uses as possible and encouraging openess between providers.

So I guess a mandate would make sense in a communist society.

I do the understand the US tech perspective on AI: A winner-takes-all game and a rush to create this single dominant AGI which all others would have to be connected to. The spoils for the winner in this game would be off the charts. And releasing something as open source in that world, beyond annoying your competitors, would make little sense.

The Cold War has been over forty years, but it's still not over in this guy's mind

Isn’t the simple answer: to compete? The first movers in a market has an advantage and gains a substantial market share. Trailing competitors may use price as a way of, at least, diminish the first movers market share somewhat while searching for other monetization opportunities until such is found or the funding eventually runs out.