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 game after DeepSeek's success.

Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max chatbot, Chinese startup 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 essential" and its venture into the field has been "years in the making", said Chen Qiheng, an affiliated researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.

Private and public investments in Chinese AI accelerated after ChatGPT took off in 2022 and showed guarantees of real-world company applications, Chen told CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's increase that actually "urged" the idea that smaller sized players like start-up companies might have functions to play in AI research study and advancements, he adds.

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The "focus on expense advantage" is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese AI, Chen states, with lower training and inference costs - the costs of utilizing a trained model to draw conclusions from brand-new data.

2025 could likewise see the development of more Chinese AI models dealing with advanced reasoning jobs.

"We could see some AI companies concentrating on getting closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete methods to commercialise their models and incorporate them with scientific research," Chen included.

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

Chinese AI business are moving quickly, experts state, constructing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own ingenious and cost-effective methods to apply generative AI to jobs and develop more advanced products beyond chatbots.

But on the flip side, access to high-end hardware, particularly Nvidia's sophisticated AI chips, remains a crucial hurdle for Chinese designers, kept in mind Dr Marina Zhang, an associate teacher at University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

"US export controls (still) restrict the ability of Chinese tech business ... requiring lots of to rely on older or lower-performance alternatives which can slow training and reduce design abilities," she said.

"While some business like DeepSeek, have actually found innovative ways to optimize or use more standard hardware efficiently, obtaining innovative chips still makes a huge difference for training really large AI models."

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So how do Chinese AI bots match up against ChatGPT? We put them to the test.

WHICH BEST ADDRESSES CURRENT EVENTS IN CHINA?

In China, topics considered delicate by the state are censored on the internet so it need to come as no surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial disagreements or [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile