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 video game after DeepSeek's success.

Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max chatbot, Chinese start-up DeepSeek and OpenAI's ChatGPT. (Photos: Reuters/Dado Ruvic, AFP/Sebastien Bozon)

This audio is created by an AI tool.

Bong Xin Ying

Lakeisha Leo

WHAT'S BEHIND CHINA'S AI BOOM?

Transforming the country into a tech superpower has 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 "strategically crucial" and its venture into the field has actually been "years in the making", said Chen Qiheng, bio.rogstecnologia.com.br an associated researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.

Private and public financial investments in Chinese AI accelerated after ChatGPT removed in 2022 and showed guarantees of real-world company applications, Chen informed CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's increase that really "encouraged" the concept that smaller sized gamers like start-up firms might have functions to play in AI research and developments, he includes.

'A lot is up in the air': Is Chinese firm DeepSeek's AI design as impactful as it claims?

Commentary: DeepSeek - how a Chinese AI company just changed the guidelines of tech-geopolitics

The "emphasis on expense benefit" is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese AI, Chen states, with lower training and reasoning costs - the expenses of using a trained model to draw conclusions from brand-new data.

2025 could likewise see the emergence of more Chinese AI designs taking on innovative thinking tasks.

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

AGI describes a system with intelligence on par with human abilities.

Chinese AI business are moving quickly, experts state, setiathome.berkeley.edu developing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own innovative and economical methods to apply generative AI to tasks and develop advanced items beyond chatbots.

But on the other side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia's sophisticated AI chips, remains a key obstacle 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) limit the capability of Chinese tech business ... requiring numerous to depend on older or lower-performance options which can slow training and decrease model abilities," she said.

"While some business like DeepSeek, have actually discovered imaginative methods to optimize or utilize more basic hardware effectively, obtaining innovative chips still makes a huge distinction for training huge AI models."

DeepSeek-Nvidia chips: Singapore says it anticipates business to abide by its laws

US checking out whether DeepSeek utilized limited AI chips obtained through other nations, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile