China’s AI industry looks unstoppable, but can it overtake the US for tech supremacy?

Hong Kong
—

When China’s biggest artificial intelligence players gathered for a landmark meeting in Beijing in January, one question was in the spotlight: What are the chances of a Chinese AI firm overtaking US frontrunners in the next three to five years?

The answer from a top AI scientist present at the gathering was surprisingly blunt: “Below 20 percent,” said Justin Lin, technical lead for Chinese tech giant Alibaba’s Qwen AI models. “And I think 20 percent is already very optimistic.”

The sobering assessment stood in stark contrast to a year of headlines celebrating China’s AI boom.

Since little-known startup DeepSeek shocked the world with a powerful AI model it said was built at a fraction of the cost of American equivalents, Chinese companies have topped global downloads for freely-available-to-use models and raised huge sums in market debuts.

Yet despite the fanfare, some leading Chinese AI developers have warned that China may have fallen further behind in developing frontier models. Experts point to restricted access to advanced chips and limited capital as lingering constraints.

Lin was not alone. Tang Jie, founder of one of the prominent Chinese AI startups Z.ai, also known as Zhipu, said the performance gap between Chinese and US models “may be widening.”

“In some areas we may be doing fairly well, but we also need to acknowledge the challenges and gaps we still face,” he said at the same Beijing meeting.

But that assessment does not mean China’s AI industry is stagnating.

Constraints in accessing high-performance chips and capital as well as the country’s unique tech ecosystem have fueled a divergent strategy from the US – making AI models available for public use, or…

Source