Khaberni - Hundreds of millions of users flock to the Pinterest platform every month searching for the latest fashion trends.
One of the pages titled "the most ridiculous things" - which means "I desire the things" - is filled with bizarre ideas that inspire creators, from re-used Crocs as flower pots to eyeshadows shaped like a burger sandwich from gingerbread made of vegetables.
However, what potential buyers may not know is that the underlying technology behind these ideas is not necessarily American-made; "Pinterest" is conducting experiments with Chinese AI models to improve its recommendation system, according to a report by the British Broadcasting Corporation "BBC".
And said the company's president, Bill Ready: "We've essentially made Pinterest an AI-powered shopping assistant."
Of course, this trend-setting company based in San Francisco could use any number of American AI labs to operate the systems behind the scenes.
But since the launch of the "DeepSeek R-1" Chinese model in January 2025, Chinese AI technologies have increasingly become part of "Pinterest".
Ready describes what is known as the "Deep Seek moment" as a significant breakthrough and said: "They chose to make it open source, which sparked a wave of open-source models."
Among the Chinese competitors are "Queen" models from Alibaba and "Kemi" from Moonshot, while ByteDance, owner of TikTok, works on similar technology.
Matt Madrigal, the CTO of "Pinterest," said the strength of these models is that they can be freely downloaded and customized by companies like his, which is not the case for most models offered by American competitors such as OpenAI, developers of the chatbot ChatGPT.
Madrigal added: "The open-source technologies we use to train our internal models are 30% more accurate than the leading off-the-shelf models."
He explained that these enhanced recommendations come at a much lower cost, sometimes up to 90% less than using the closed models preferred by American AI developers.
"Fast and cheap"
"Pinterest" isn't the only American company relying on Chinese AI technologies; these models are gaining momentum among a range of Fortune 500 companies.
Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, told Bloomberg in October that his company heavily relied on Alibaba's Queen model to run its smart customer service agent.
Chesky presented three simple reasons for this: the model is "excellent," "fast," and "cheap."
More evidence of this can be found on the "Hugging Face" platform, where users turn to download ready-made AI models, including those from major development companies like Meta and Alibaba.
Jeff Boudier, who develops products on the platform, said cost is what drives startups to prefer Chinese models over their American counterparts.
He added: "If you look at the most popular models on Hugging Face - those with the most downloads and likes - usually, Chinese models from Chinese labs are in many of the top ten ranks."
He continued: "There are weeks where four out of every five leading training models on Hugging Face are from Chinese labs."
In September, the Queen model surpassed Meta's Lama model to become the most downloaded large language model on the "Hugging Face" platform.
Meta launched open-source AI models named Lama in 2023. Until the release of models from Deep Seek and Alibaba, it was considered the primary option for developers working on customized applications.
But the launch of Lama 4 last year disappointed developers, and according to reports, "Meta" started using open-source models with Alibaba, Google, and OpenAI to train a new set of models set to be released this spring.
Chinese Success
At the start of 2025, the prevailing opinion was that although American tech companies were spending billions of dollars, Chinese companies posed a threat of surpassing them.
Boudier said: "That is no longer the story," adding: "The best model now is an open-source model."
A report published by Stanford University last month concluded that Chinese AI models "appear to have caught up or even surpassed" their global counterparts, whether in terms of capabilities or user numbers.
In a recent interview with the "BBC," former British Deputy Prime Minister Sir Nick Clegg said he felt that American companies had been overly focused on pursuing AI that might someday surpass human intelligence.
Some experts now describe these ambitions as vague and ill-defined, giving China a chance to dominate the field of open-source AI.
Stanford's report also noted that China's success in developing open-source models could partly be attributed to government support.
On the other side of the world, American companies like "OpenAI" face tremendous pressure to increase their revenues and achieve profitability, and are now turning to advertising to do so.
