Lee Kai-Fu, a pioneer in AI in China, believes that DeepSeek, Alibaba, and ByteDance will dominate the domestic AI market. Meanwhile, in the US, the top four names according to his prediction are xAI, OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic.

DeepSeek, a low-cost yet high-performance AI model, has been driving global AI development since its launch in January. According to Mr. Lee, the Chinese startup has demonstrated the effectiveness of the open-source model and encouraged more developers to adopt this method.

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Lee Kai-Fu, former president of Google China, is one of the prominent figures in the global AI industry. Photo: Bloomberg

US sanctions have made it difficult for China to access Nvidia’s most advanced chips, forcing domestic developers from DeepSeek to Moonshot to Baidu to constantly innovate to stay ahead.

Lee Kai-Fu, former head of Google in China, said that so far the sanctions have not been as effective as expected.

“DeepSeek really benefits from having fewer resources and being able to train and infer at 5 to 10 times lower cost than OpenAI and others,” he said.

Startup 01.AI founded by Mr. Li initially focused on building large-scale AI platforms but recently changed its strategy, as pursuing models with trillions of parameters was too costly.

Instead, he shifted to partnering with DeepSeek and Alibaba to develop specialized AI applications serving industries based on platform technology.

“OpenAI’s operating costs in 2024 are $7 billion, while DeepSeek will probably only cost about 2% of that. Is OpenAI’s model sustainable?” – Mr. Ly asked.

The rise of DeepSeek could make it difficult for Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, to get a good night's sleep, he said.

Venture capitalists in the US and China are also shifting from funding pioneering AI models to investing in AI infrastructure, application companies, and solutions for enterprise customers.

In China, local governments are also actively involved in promoting AI development, after Beijing identified it as a strategic priority area.

(According to Bloomberg)