The Chinese AI company, DeepSeek, has caused a stir in the market by claiming its new AI model, R1, rivals OpenAI’s offerings, despite using less advanced chips and energy.
DeepSeek’s emergence has sparked concerns that China might have surpassed the U.S. in AI, even with chip access limitations. This is just one example of numerous Chinese companies pursuing AI leadership by 2030, challenging U.S. technological dominance.
China, like the U.S., is investing billions in AI. A recent example is a 60 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) AI investment fund, established shortly after new U.S. chip export restrictions were imposed.
Beijing has significantly invested in its semiconductor industry to develop advanced chip production capabilities, mitigating its reliance on industry leaders. Incentives include talent programs, subsidies, AI academies, and incorporating AI education into primary and secondary schools.
China has implemented AI regulations addressing safety, privacy, and ethics. The ruling Communist Party also influences the content AI models can generate, with DeepSeek adapting its responses accordingly.
Here’s a summary of other leading Chinese AI models.
Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-2.5-1M
Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-2.5-1M is part of the e-commerce giant’s open-source AI series. These large language models handle extensive queries, facilitating extended and in-depth conversations. Their capabilities in reasoning, dialogue, and code comprehension are continuously improving.
Similar to competitors, Alibaba Cloud offers a publicly available chatbot, Qwen (or Tongyi Qianwen in China). Alibaba Cloud’s AI models, including the Qwen2.5 series, primarily serve developers and businesses (automakers, banks, game developers, retailers) for product development and customer experience enhancement.
Baidu’s Ernie Bot 4.0
Ernie Bot, developed by Baidu (China’s leading search engine), was released publicly in China. Baidu stated this release aimed to gather extensive real-world user feedback to improve the model.
As of June 2024, Ernie Bot 4.0 had over 300 million users. Like OpenAI’s ChatGPT, users can ask questions and generate images from text prompts.
ByteDance’s Doubao 1.5 Pro
Doubao 1.5 Pro, released last week by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, is a popular Chinese AI chatbot with 60 million monthly active users.
ByteDance claims Doubao 1.5 Pro surpasses ChatGPT-4 in knowledge retention, coding, reasoning, and Chinese language processing. They attribute this to a highly optimized architecture balancing performance and reduced computational needs, lowering hardware costs.
Moonshot AI’s Kimi k1.5
Moonshot AI, a Beijing-based startup valued at over $3 billion, claims its Kimi k1.5 model either matches or exceeds OpenAI’s o1 model. The o1 model is designed for more deliberative responses to complex problems. Moonshot asserts Kimi’s superiority in mathematics, coding, and processing textual and visual inputs (photos and videos).