DeepSeek's rise heralds seismic change in AI landscape

Major strides

China is now home to more than one-third of the world's LLMs, according to the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology. The number of LLMs worldwide has reached 1,328, with 36 percent from China, the second-largest after the US, the academy said.

Wang Peng, an associate research fellow at the Beijing Academy of Social Sciences, said China's major advantages in developing AI models lie in its abundant data resources and diverse application scenarios, while the US has taken the lead in basic AI research, chips, algorithms and other key technologies.

Chinese AI startup Moonshot AI recently launched its newest model Kimi k1.5. The model has made breakthroughs in multimodal reasoning capacity, allowing it to handle complex inputs that combine text, visuals, audio and even code. It has also shown strong ability in processing long sections of text, such as a staggering 200,000 characters in a single query.

The Beijing-based startup said the new model, which is designed to spend more time "thinking" before it responds and can solve more complicated problems, outperforms other leading models such as GPT-4o in mathematics and coding.

Moonshot AI was founded in March 2023 by Yang Zhilin, who graduated from Tsinghua University and received his doctoral degree in computer science from Carnegie Mellon University in the US. The company has secured major funding from Alibaba, Tencent and social media platform Xiaohongshu.

China's AI industry will make big strides in the next 10 to 15 years, with its market size reaching 1.73 trillion yuan ($236.7 billion) by 2035, accounting for 30.6 percent of the world's total, according to data from market research company CCID Consulting.

Ouyang Rihui, assistant dean of the China Center for Internet Economy Research at the Central University of Finance and Economics, said the AI achievements of Chinese companies prove that they have circumvented traditional limitations and created what could become a new path for collective technological advancement.

"The US has sought to curb China's technological rise through export controls and investment restrictions in recent years. However, Chinese tech companies have developed their own alternative solutions to train models on less high-end chips through optimizing algorithms, model architectures and training procedures," Ouyang said.

Zhu Keli, founding director of the China Institute of New Economy, said the opensource approach adopted by a string of Chinese AI companies will lower the technical threshold, speed up the popularization of AI technology, and allow more enterprises and developers to participate in AI research and development.

Zhu believes technological innovation is unstoppable, and international cooperation serves as an important way to promote the development of AI technology, adding that China's open and inclusive attitude helps promote the coordinated advancement of the global AI industry.

"Chinese AI companies' breakthroughs demonstrate their rising competitiveness on the global stage, and will drive industrial upgrading and inject strong impetus into global economic growth," Zhu said, adding that in the development process of AI technology, challenges still remain in terms of algorithm improvement, privacy protection and data security.

Yu Yi, technology lead at Accenture China, said that as companies strive to stay ahead and adapt to fast-changing markets, they are increasingly turning to state-of-the-art AI technology to fuel their innovation efforts, adding that the proportion of Chinese companies stepping up investment and boosting the application of AI is rising dramatically.

Although AI brings about new development opportunities, challenges remain. Experts called for efforts to ensure the safe and reliable application of AI technology through global governance.

Zeng Yi, a researcher at the Institute of Automation, which is part of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, said the management and governance of risks brought by AI are becoming increasingly important, and the responsible and appropriate use of AI will allow this technology to benefit all humans.

More efforts are needed to strengthen international cooperation in promoting sustainable development of AI, and to establish a global AI development and governance institution under the framework of the United Nations, he said.