The Sunflower piece is the real tell here. Ugandan developers picked a Chinese model not because it’s better engineered, but because they could download it and run it on actual hardware they own. Meanwhile US models are either API-locked or require compute budgets that don’t exist outside the Valley.
This isn’t a quality story or an ideology story. It’s an access story.
source: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/05/technology/ai-china-africa.html
