In what seems like the blink of an eye, China has gone from being up to five years behind the United Statesin 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.
