In what seems like the blink of an eye, China has gone from being up to five years behind the United States in top-tier artificial intelligence (AI) to lagging by just a few months.
While US players, including Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's ChatGPT, have spent hundreds of billions of dollars to push the frontier of AI, China has pursued a very different path.
Faced with US curbs on high-end chips that help AI to do its most advanced thinking, Chinese tech firms have prioritized dozens of open-source AI models built on "good enough" technology.
These platforms, including DeepSeek, Alibaba's Qwen and Xiaomi's MiMo, are now widely deployed across Chinese businesses, government services and consumer devices.
Chinese AI models narrow gap with US leaders
