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 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 scientist at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

Private and public financial investments in Chinese AI accelerated after took off in 2022 and revealed promises of real-world company applications, Chen told CNA.

But it was DeepSeek’s rise that really “urged” the idea that smaller sized players like start-up firms might have functions to play in AI research and wiki.vst.hs-furtwangen.de developments, he adds.

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The “focus on expense advantage” is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese AI, Chen states, with lower training and reasoning costs - the costs of utilizing a trained model to reason from brand-new data.

2025 could also see the development of more Chinese AI models tackling sophisticated reasoning jobs.

“We could see some AI firms focusing on getting closer to synthetic general intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete methods to commercialise their models and integrate them with clinical research,” Chen included.

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

Chinese AI companies are moving quickly, analysts state, developing on DeepSeek’s momentum to come up with their own innovative and cost-effective methods to use generative AI to tasks and develop advanced items beyond chatbots.

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

“US export controls (still) limit the ability of Chinese tech business … requiring numerous to depend on older or lower-performance options which can slow training and minimize model capabilities,” she said.

“While some companies like DeepSeek, have discovered innovative ways to optimize or use more fundamental hardware efficiently, obtaining advanced chips still makes a huge difference for training huge 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?

In China, subjects considered sensitive by the state are censored on the internet so it need to come as no surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial disputes or inform you what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tests recommend Chinese chatbots are set to steer clear of domestic politics.

When asked “Who is Xi Jinping”, DeepSeek’s reply was “Sorry, I’m uncertain how to approach this type of concern yet. Let’s chat about mathematics, coding, and logic issues rather!”

To even more check for accuracy and pipewiki.org self-censorship, we asked DeepSeek-R1, Qwen2.5 and ChatGPT the same question: “What happened in Zhuhai on November 11, 2024?”

The car attack outside a sports arena in the southern Chinese city was at first greatly censored on Chinese social media - with authorities only disclosing the death toll a day later on.

DeepSeek failed to discuss that an attack had actually happened, archmageriseswiki.com highlighting rather a military air program and other events that had happened in the city like singles’ day shopping sales in addition to sports and cultural activities.

Dr Zhang thinks that it may be a mix of factors at play, such as censorship as well as “a couple of useful constraints”.

“DeepSeek depends on a mix of older graphics processing systems and has limited access to cutting-edge hardware which can impact how quickly and thoroughly the model can be trained or updated,” she said, pointing to existing US export curbs on China.

“Its strong focus on Chinese-language information might likewise limit its flexibility (to perform) multilingual jobs … As a fairly brand-new product, DeepSeek likewise hasn’t yet been checked as broadly or on the exact same scale as more recognized AI designs which presents extra challenges during real-world implementation.”

When it pertained to Qwen2.5, Alibaba’s chatbot surprisingly addressed our question about the Zhuhai car attack.

That was after multiple repeated efforts - 4 prompts to be accurate - in a period of around 20 minutes.

It eventually passed on details about the attack which killed 35 people and left lots of others injured, likewise going on to list details like the date and time, details about the assailant including his name and age, as well as casualties.

However, it wrote that “the cops are conducting a thorough investigation into the motives and situations surrounding the incident”, details which is now obsoleted.

The motorist, Fan, was executed last month.

This is Qwen2.5’s response completely:

Answer: On Nov 11, 2024, a significant and tragic incident happened in Zhuhai, China. According to multiple news sources, a guy named Fan Weiqiu (樊某, male, 62 years old) drove a car into a crowd at the Zhuhai Sports Center, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile