![\"AI\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/AFP__20250401__38P88CP__v1__MidRes__GermanyTechInternetAiArtificialIntelligence-1763000324.jpg\")
AI letters are shown on a laptop screen next to the logo of the Deepseek AI application in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on April 1, 2025 [Kirill Kudryavtsev\/AFP]<\/p>\nChina\u2019s AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies and earning the praise of a growing list of tech leaders.<\/p>\n
Their rapid ascent has highlighted the competitive edge that Chinese developers such as Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax have been able to gain by offering so-called \u201copen\u201d language models at much lower costs than their rivals in the United States.<\/p>\n
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The trend has also cast a critical glare on the US\u2019s efforts to stunt China\u2019s tech sector with export controls on advanced chips, which have not stopped Chinese developers from approaching the capabilities of Silicon Valley\u2019s tech giants.<\/p>\n
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky generated headlines in October when he revealed that the short-term rental platform had opted for Alibaba\u2019s Qwen over OpenAI\u2019s ChatGPT, praising the Chinese model as \u201cfast and cheap\u201d.<\/p>\n
Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya revealed the same month that his company had migrated much of its work to Moonshot\u2019s Kimi K2 as it was \u201cway more performant\u201d and \u201ca ton cheaper\u201d than models from OpenAI and Anthropic.<\/p>\n
Programmers on social media also recently highlighted evidence that two popular US-developed coding assistants, Composer and Windsurf, were built on Chinese models.<\/p>\n
The assistants\u2019 developers, Cursor and Cognition AI, have not publicly confirmed their use of Chinese technology and did not respond to requests for comment, though Z.ai has said the speculation aligns with its \u201cinternal findings.\u201d<\/p>\n
AI letters are shown on a laptop screen next to the logo of the Deepseek AI application in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, on April 1, 2025 [Kirill Kudryavtsev\/AFP]<\/p>\n
Nathan Lambert, a machine learning researcher who founded the Atom Project, an initiative to promote open models in the US, said such public examples were the \u201ctip of the iceberg\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cChinese open models have become a de facto standard among startups in the US,\u201d Lambert told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve personally heard of many other high-profile cases, where the most valued and hyped American AI startups are starting training models on the likes of Qwen, Kimi, GLM or DeepSeek,\u201d Lambert said, adding that many US firms have been reluctant to publicly disclose their use of Chinese technology.<\/p>\n
While it is not possible to precisely quantify the usage of different AI models, industry data points to the rising popularity of Chinese offerings.<\/p>\n
Chinese AI tools, including MiniMax\u2019s M2, Z.ai\u2019s GLM 4.6 and DeepSeek\u2019s V3.2, took up seven spots among the 20 models with the most usage last week, according to data from OpenRouter, a platform that connects developers with AI models.<\/p>\n
Among the top 10 models used for programming, four were developed by Chinese firms, according to OpenRouter.<\/p>\n
In the open model space, China\u2019s clear lead is evident, with cumulative downloads surpassing 540 million as of October, according to an Atom Project analysis of data from hosting platform Hugging Face.<\/p>\n
Rui Ma, the founder of Tech Buzz China, said Chinese models are particularly attractive to fledgling startups, while \u201chigh-resource organisations\u201d have gravitated towards premium US models.<\/p>\n
\u201cThese are typically cost-conscious early-stage companies that experiment widely, and\u00a0many of them will not survive,\u201d Ma told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
Unlike leading US platforms such as ChatGPT, China\u2019s open-weight large language models make their trained parameters \u2013 called weights \u2013 publicly available.<\/p>\n
While open-weight models do not generate licensing or subscription fees, running them at enterprise scale requires large amounts of computing power, which creators can offer to users at a cost.<\/p>\n
Developers such as Beijing-based Z.ai and Hangzhou-based DeepSeek have reported using older-generation chips that are not subject to US export controls, in relatively small quantities, dramatically reducing training and hardware costs compared with their Silicon Valley rivals.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe success of these Chinese models demonstrates the failure of export controls to limit China,\u201d Toby Walsh, an expert in AI at the University of New South Wales, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cIndeed, they\u2019ve actually encouraged Chinese companies to be more resourceful and build better models that are smaller and are trained on and run on older generation hardware. Necessity is the mother of invention.\u201d<\/p>\n
With lower input costs, Chinese firms have been able to offer their services far more cheaply than their US peers.<\/p>\n
In an analysis published by AllianceBernstein in February, DeepSeek\u2019s pricing for its models at the time was estimated to be up to 40 times cheaper than OpenAI\u2019s, for instance.<\/p>\n
![\"Alibaba\"](\"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/AP24135627977204-1763000619.jpg\")
The logo of Chinese technology firm Alibaba is seen at its office in Beijing, China [File: Mark Schiefelbein\/AP Photo]<\/p>\n
\u201cI do think China\u2019s AI progress has been underestimated, partly because the signal is fragmented,\u201d Greg Slabaugh, a professor who studies AI at Queen Mary University of London, told Al Jazeera.<\/p>\n
\u201cMuch of the uptake of Chinese models is in China. China\u2019s scale in AI publications and patents has long been visible; the emergence of open-weight models simply makes that capability more globally consumable.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some industry analysts have likened China\u2019s approach to AI to the strategy undertaken by Chinese firms in other industries, such as solar panels, that flooded markets with cheap goods.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is the solar panel playbook running on software,\u201d Poe Zhao, a Beijing-based tech analyst, wrote last week in his Substack newsletter, Hello China Tech.<\/p>\n
But while Chinese AI models have made inroads with their low cost, US tech giants are in a strong position to dominate the high-end market and highly regulated sectors where considerations such as national security are paramount, according to analysts.<\/p>\n
Ma, the Tech Buzz China founder, said the development of AI could end up following a similar trajectory to the Android and iPhone platforms, the former of which has about three times as many users worldwide.<\/p>\n
\u201cOver the longer term \u2013 likely faster than what we saw in the mobile era \u2013 it\u2019s entirely possible that AI adoption might follow similar economic dynamics. There are simply more users in the world who prioritise affordability than those who choose premium options,\u201d Ma said.<\/p>\n
\u201cBut that doesn\u2019t mean the greatest margins or market capitalisation will exist at the low end; value may still concentrate where differentiation, performance and trust command a premium.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u201cIn Fortune 500 and regulated sectors, widespread adoption is probably not imminent,\u201d said Slabaugh, the Queen Mary University of London professor, referring to the uptake of Chinese models.<\/p>\n
\u201cIf there is a \u2018rude awakening\u2019, it may come on the pricing and flexibility front rather than from a sudden displacement of US models.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"China\u2019s AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":130432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,343,344,2681,184,85,46,125,1032],"class_list":["post-130431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-business-and-economy","tag-economy","tag-il","tag-israel","tag-technology","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=130431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/130431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/130432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=130431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=130431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=130431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}