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 lags CHINA'S AI BOOM?

Transforming the nation into a tech superpower has actually long been President Xi Jinping's goal and China has its sights on becoming the world leader in AI by 2030.

China views AI as being "strategically crucial" and its venture into the field has been "years in the making", said Chen Qiheng, an affiliated researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.

Private and public financial investments in Chinese AI sped up after ChatGPT removed in 2022 and revealed pledges of real-world business applications, Chen told CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's rise that truly "encouraged" the idea that smaller players like start-up firms could have roles to play in AI research study and developments, he adds.

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The "emphasis on expense benefit" is an unique function of Chinese AI, Chen says, with lower training and inference costs - the expenses of utilizing a trained model to draw conclusions from new data.

2025 could also see the development of more Chinese AI models taking on innovative reasoning tasks.

"We might see some AI firms focusing on getting closer to synthetic basic intelligence (AGI) while others focus on concrete methods to commercialise their models and integrate them with scientific research study," Chen included.

AGI describes a system with intelligence on par with human abilities.

Chinese AI companies are moving rapidly, analysts say, constructing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own ingenious and cost-efficient methods to apply generative AI to tasks and establish advanced products beyond chatbots.

But on the flip side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia's advanced AI chips, remains an essential hurdle for Chinese designers, it-viking.ch noted Dr Marina Zhang, an associate professor at University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

"US export controls (still) limit the capability of Chinese tech companies ... requiring lots of to count on older or lower-performance alternatives which can slow training and decrease model capabilities," she said.

"While some business like DeepSeek, have actually found imaginative methods to optimize or use more fundamental hardware efficiently, obtaining advanced chips still makes a big distinction 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?

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