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)

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Bong Xin Ying

Lakeisha Leo

WHAT’S BEHIND CHINA’S AI BOOM?

Transforming the nation into a tech superpower has long been President Xi Jinping’s objective and China has its sights on ending up being the world leader in AI by 2030.

China views AI as being “tactically important” and its venture into the field has actually been “years in the making”, said Chen Qiheng, an associated researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

Private and public investments in Chinese AI sped up after ChatGPT took off in 2022 and showed pledges of real-world organization applications, Chen informed CNA.

But it was DeepSeek’s increase that truly “encouraged” the idea that smaller players like start-up firms could have functions to play in AI research study and developments, he includes.

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The “emphasis on expense advantage” is a distinctive feature of Chinese AI, Chen says, setiathome.berkeley.edu with lower training and reasoning expenses - the expenses of using a trained model to reason from new information.

2025 might likewise see the development of more Chinese AI designs taking on sophisticated thinking tasks.

“We could see some AI firms concentrating on getting closer to artificial basic intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete methods to commercialise their designs and incorporate them with clinical research study,” Chen added.

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

Chinese AI business are moving quickly, experts say, building on DeepSeek’s momentum to come up with their own innovative and cost-efficient ways to use generative AI to jobs and develop advanced products beyond chatbots.

But on the other side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia’s sophisticated AI chips, remains a key difficulty for designers, noted Dr Marina Zhang, an associate professor at University of Technology Sydney’s (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

“US export controls (still) restrict the capability of Chinese tech business … forcing lots of to depend on older or lower-performance alternatives which can slow training and decrease model capabilities,” she said.

“While some companies like DeepSeek, have actually discovered imaginative ways to optimize or utilize more fundamental hardware effectively, obtaining cutting-edge chips still makes a big distinction for training very big AI designs.”

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

WHICH BEST ADDRESSES CURRENT EVENTS IN CHINA?

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