Former Tencent AI chief says LLMs cannot beat U.S., points to AI video as next battleground

Kuaishou’s AI video generator “Kling”. [Photo: Kuaishou]

A sense of crisis is growing within China’s artificial intelligence industry over the competitiveness of large language models (LLMs). Public benchmark scores appear to show the gap with the United States narrowing, but assessments say China remains in catch-up mode in terms of actual technological innovation. Some Chinese AI companies are moving to make video-generation AI a new breakthrough instead of text-based LLMs.

According to the South China Morning Post on Thursday, Liu Wei, who led Tencent’s generative AI foundation model organisation Hunyuan, pointed to a lack of “paradigm innovation” as the biggest problem in China’s AI industry. He assessed Chinese companies as remaining at the level of following approaches used by DeepSeek or U.S. companies in core technologies.

Liu stressed that public performance indicators and actual technical capabilities can differ. He said Chinese models post similar numbers to U.S. companies in benchmark tests, but a gap still exists in practical usability and the pace of innovation. He said U.S. companies keep presenting new technological directions while leading Chinese players focus on quickly following them.

He put the current U.S.-China AI technology gap at at least 3 months and said it could widen to 6 months within this year. He cited the possibility of OpenAI releasing its next-generation model GPT-5.6 and forecast that the United States could again push the technology front forward.

“Chinese companies are replicating U.S. companies at the level of core technologies,” Liu said. “If they lose the ability for paradigm innovation, another company will eventually overturn the market,” he warned. He argued that surviving in the AI race requires not simple pursuit but presenting new technological directions directly.

Against this…

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