How do Chinese AI bots stack up against ChatGPT? We put them to the test

The heat is on as China's tech giants step up their video game after DeepSeek's success.

Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max chatbot, Chinese start-up DeepSeek and OpenAI's ChatGPT. (Photos: Reuters/Dado Ruvic, AFP/Sebastien Bozon)

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Bong Xin Ying

Lakeisha Leo

WHAT lags CHINA'S AI BOOM?

Transforming the nation into a tech superpower has actually long been President Xi Jinping's goal and China has its sights on ending up being the world leader in AI by 2030.

China views AI as being "tactically crucial" and its venture into the field has been "years in the making", said Chen Qiheng, an associated scientist at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.

Private and public financial investments in Chinese AI sped up after ChatGPT took off in 2022 and revealed guarantees of real-world business applications, Chen informed CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's rise that really "encouraged" the concept that smaller sized gamers like start-up firms might have roles to play in AI research and advancements, he includes.

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The "emphasis on expense benefit" is an unique feature of Chinese AI, Chen says, with lower training and reasoning expenses - the costs of utilizing a trained design to reason from new information.

2025 might also see the emergence of more Chinese AI designs taking on advanced reasoning tasks.

"We could see some AI firms concentrating on getting closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI) while others focus on concrete methods to commercialise their models and integrate them with clinical research study," Chen added.

AGI refers to a system with intelligence on par with human capabilities.

Chinese AI companies are moving rapidly, analysts state, developing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own ingenious and cost-effective methods to use generative AI to jobs and establish advanced products beyond chatbots.

But on the other side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia's sophisticated AI chips, pipewiki.org remains a key difficulty for Chinese designers, noted Dr Marina Zhang, an associate teacher at University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

"US export controls (still) limit the capability of Chinese tech business ... forcing lots of to depend on older or lower-performance options which can slow training and reduce model abilities," she said.

"While some companies like DeepSeek, have actually discovered innovative ways to enhance or use more standard hardware effectively, obtaining innovative chips still makes a big distinction for training very large AI models."

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US checking out whether DeepSeek utilized restricted AI chips obtained through other countries, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile