title: The Rise of China's LLMs: A Complete History from 2017 to 2026 published: ture description: From Wu Dao 2.0 (1.75T params) to DeepSeek V3 ($5.6M training cost) — the full story of how Chinese AI labs went from "cheap copy" to genuine competitors. tags: ai, deepseek, machinelearning, llm, china cover_image:
I've been following the AI space since the GPT-2 days, and one thing that consistently surprises people is how far Chinese AI labs have come in just a few years. Most Western developers still think "Chinese AI" = "cheap copy." The reality is far more interesting.
Let me walk through the full timeline.
2017–2020: The Foundation Years
The story starts, as most LLM stories do, with the Transformer paper ("Attention Is All You Need") from Google Brain in 2017. Chinese researchers were deeply involved from the start — several of the paper's authors were Chinese nationals who later returned to China to build AI labs.
