A mainland Chinese venture capital firm says China's artificial intelligence still needs improvement in six aspects, from ecosystem to funding, but the arrival of DeepSeek has greatly increased the field's confidence in overcoming US regulations.
China and the United States are the two biggest players in global AI development, with the former leading in humanoid robotics and open source large-scale language models, said Zhou Qi, managing partner at GSR United Capital, which focuses on early-stage investments in advanced manufacturing, AI and biotechnology. The company manages assets of more than 10 billion yuan (US$1.4 billion).
“But we [China] “We still lag behind some developed countries such as the US in terms of 'soft power,'” Zhou said, referring to ecosystem, standardization, funding, talent, branding and AI ethics.
More importantly, China lacked a comprehensive ecosystem like the Compute Unified Device Architecture built by Nvidia, which allows developers to use the American tech giant's graphics processing units (GPUs) to create applications, Zhou said.
He said that amid the technology sector decoupling initiated by the US, Chinese companies need to open up their models to build a better ecosystem, while adding that overseas companies will continue to follow the standards set by the US. He said the Chinese ecosystem's influence in standardization is limited by the low participation of international developers and users.
