Chinese and foreign tourists watch a robot dog dressed in a panda costume at Unitree's first experience center in Asia in Shanghai.
A string of eye-catching breakthroughs has put China's AI industry in the global spotlight. A humanoid robot developed by Chinese tech firm Unitree featured as a guest on a Polish TV show, while V4, the latest open-source large model of Chinese AI company DeepSeek, has made headlines across major international news outlets.
Riding the worldwide AI boom, China has followed a distinctive homegrown roadmap for open-source development to upgrade its domestic AI sector. As it builds up indigenous innovation capabilities, the country also fuels sustained growth for the global digital and intelligent industry.
The vitality of an innovation ecosystem is often reflected in the data. According to a report released by a leading international open-source platform, Chinese-developed models accounted for 41 percent of all large-model downloads on the platform over the past year, making China one of the world's most active and fastest-growing sources of open-source AI models.
Another report, jointly released by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the same platform found that Chinese-developed open-source models surpassed those from the United States in global downloads for the first time last year, ranking first worldwide.
