this post was submitted on 01 Jan 2025
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This isn't a super surprising result. Even American companies have been talking about how China is quickly catching up in the AI space. And if Americans are admitting it, you know it's true. Also, anybody who's been watching the open source scene has understood that the Chinese models are very competitive. There are many many leaderboards comparing things, but Qwen, built by Alibaba cloud, is constantly at the top of the list. In fact, in one list that I'm watching, the Qwen-based models encompass the top 20.
Then, of course, they have their own closed source language models, so a little harder to test against, but by most accounts, they are right behind ChatGPT and Claude.
DeepSeek V3 is an exceptionally large model, so it's a little hard to do direct comparisons exactly, but it's blowing the things out of the water, and that's pretty crazy.
Good points. I had thought that China was always ahead, though. The Western companies just launched the public app thing in a flashier way, while in China, it's been used 'behind the scenes' rather than released for general public consumption. Now there's some Chinese competition for the public apps and they seem to be btfo the western versions.
That is, I'd thought that China's was ahead in AI since the start but the western LLMs took the spotlight for a while and now are losing it already to Chinese LLMs.
Good distinction. China hasn't been behind in AI in general, just this new LLM stuff. But China also uses it's AI for more useful things instead of just advertisements and recommendation engines, though I'm sure they use it there too. But yeah, China is catching up on LLMs, and fast. The chip war has affected their ability to get faster chips, and catch up even faster, but the tech they have is sufficient, and improving faster than westerners predicted (As it always does, the west is WAY to confident in itself and WAY underestimates China's abilities)