In response to DeepSeek’s emergence, US President Donald Trump called it a “wake-up call” for US tech companies. The gap between US and Chinese AI is gradually narrowing.

DeepSeek is not the only company making significant progress in this area. Other Chinese tech companies are also racing to release their latest AI models, which they claim are on par with DeepSeek or OpenAI.

deepseek shutterstock
DeepSeek is a "wake-up call" for US tech companies, according to President Donald Trump. Photo: Shutterstock

Alibaba Cloud

On January 29, the first day of the Lunar New Year holiday, Alibaba Cloud launched an updated version of its Qwen 2.5 model, called Qwen 2.5-Max. According to the company, Qwen 2.5-Max beat DeepSeek V3 and Meta Llama 3.1 on 11 benchmarks.

Analysts say Alibaba Cloud’s announcement of Qwen 2.5-Max right on the eve of the Lunar New Year shows the pressure that DeepSeek is putting on the domestic market. In addition, the company may also want to “take advantage” of the attention that DeepSeek brings to Chinese models.

Zhipu

Zhipu is a Beijing-based startup backed by Alibaba. Known as one of China’s “AI tigers,” the startup has been in the spotlight not only for its AI achievements but also for being blacklisted by the United States.

On January 15, Zhipu was among more than 20 Chinese entities added to the US trade blacklist for allegedly supporting the military with AI technology. Zhipu condemned the decision, saying it lacked factual basis.

There’s no denying the startup’s rapid progress in the AI ​​space. Its most recent product is AutoGLM, an AI assistant launched in October 2024 that lets users control their smartphones with complex voice commands.

Moonshot AI

On the same day DeepSeek announced R1, another Chinese startup announced a large language model that could challenge OpenAI’s o1 in math and reasoning. Moonshot AI, also backed by Alibaba, is headquartered in Beijing and valued at $3.3 billion. It was launched in the same year as DeepSeek in 2023.

The Kimi k1.5 product is an upgraded version of Kimi - the first AI assistant that can handle 200,000 Chinese characters in a single prompt. According to Moonshoot AI, Kimi is upgraded to handle up to 2 million characters.

ByteDance

Another AI product launched in time for the Lunar New Year comes from TikTok parent company ByteDance. On January 29, ByteDance announced Doubao-1.5-pro, claiming to beat OpenAI o1 in several metrics.

In addition to competing on performance, the company also challenges rivals on cost. Doubao's most powerful version charges 9 yuan per 1 million tokens, half the price of DeepSeek-R1. Meanwhile, OpenAI o1 costs 438 yuan per 1 million tokens.

Tencent

Best known for its games and super app WeChat, Tencent is also a formidable name in China's AI scene. Tencent's flagship model, Hunyuan, which can generate videos from text, performs just as well as Meta Llama 3.1. Some analysts estimate that Hunyuan requires only one-tenth the computing power that Meta used to train Llama.

(According to The Guardian)