Openai's November 2022 release Chatgpt caught Chinese technology companies are completely unguarded. Overnight, companies like Alibaba, Tencent and Baidu were behind as they once competed with global players like Google and Microsoft. But almost three years later, Chinese companies have more than catching up to their US rivals. Founded in 2023, Deepseek is perhaps the most notable of Chinese participants in the AI space. Less than a year later, with just a small portion of the US model's computing and data resources, the DeepSeek-R1 rivals Openai's GPT-4O and Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet. Another startup, 01.AI, launched the Yi-lightning model. This has skyrocketed the leaderboard in terms of price, performance and accuracy. However, what is emerging in China is not clones of the Western system. This is a strategically different model of Gen AI that thrives under various constraints and adapts to meet different priorities. Companies such as Deepseek engineer different AI systems designed for cost-effective, rapid deployment and target applications while leveraging the advances in the fundamentals.
