{"id":387073,"date":"2026-01-24T00:49:08","date_gmt":"2026-01-24T00:49:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/387073\/"},"modified":"2026-01-24T00:49:08","modified_gmt":"2026-01-24T00:49:08","slug":"is-china-quietly-winning-the-ai-race","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/387073\/","title":{"rendered":"Is China quietly winning the AI race?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Pinterest is hardly the only US enterprise depending on AI tech from China.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">These models are gaining traction across an array of Fortune 500 companies.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Airbnb boss Brian Chesky told Bloomberg in October his company relied &#8220;a lot&#8221; on Alibaba&#8217;s Qwen to power its AI customer service agent.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">He gave three simple reasons &#8211; it&#8217;s &#8220;very good&#8221;, &#8220;fast&#8221; and &#8220;cheap&#8221;.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Further evidence can be found on Hugging Face, the place people go to download ready-made AI models &#8211; including from major developers Meta and Alibaba.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Jeff Boudier, who builds products at the platform, said it is the cost factor that leads young start-ups to look at Chinese models over their US counterparts.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;If you look at the top trending models on Hugging Face &#8211; the ones that are most downloaded and liked by the community &#8211; typically, Chinese models from Chinese labs occupy many of the top 10 spots,&#8221; he told me.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">&#8220;There are weeks where four out of five top training models on Hugging Face are from Chinese labs.&#8221;<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">In September, Qwen topped Meta&#8217;s Llama to become the most downloaded family of large language models on the Hugging Face platform.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Meta <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bloomberg.com\/news\/articles\/2025-12-10\/inside-meta-s-pivot-from-open-source-to-money-making-ai-model\" class=\"ssrcss-6mgqu7-InlineLink e1kn3p7n0\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" target=\"_blank\">released, external<\/a> its open-source Llama AI models in 2023. Up until the release of DeepSeek and Alibaba&#8217;s models, they were considered the go-to choice for developers working on bespoke applications.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">But the release of Llama 4 last year left developers underwhelmed, and Meta has reportedly been using open-source models with Alibaba, Google, and OpenAI to train a new model set for release this spring.<\/p>\n<p class=\"ssrcss-1q0x1qg-Paragraph e1jhz7w10\">Airbnb also uses several models, including US-based ones, hosting them securely in the company\u2019s own infrastructure. The data is never provided to the developers of the AI models they use, according to the company.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Pinterest is hardly the only US enterprise depending on AI tech from China. These models are gaining traction&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":387074,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[554,733,4308,86,56,54,55],"class_list":{"0":"post-387073","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-technology","12":"tag-uk","13":"tag-united-kingdom","14":"tag-unitedkingdom"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387073","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=387073"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/387073\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/387074"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=387073"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=387073"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=387073"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}