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DeepSeek's release of an expert system model that might duplicate the efficiency of OpenAI's o1 at a fraction of the expense has and experts. Markets reeled as Nvidia, a microchip and AI company, shed more than $500bn in market price in a record one-day loss for any business on Wall Street. Investors feared that DeepSeek challenged the supremacy of US AI leaders.

Donald Trump explained DeepSeek as a "wake-up call". In China, DeepSeek's creator, Liang Wenfeng, has actually been hailed as a national hero and was welcomed to go to a symposium chaired by China's premier, Li Qiang. The rate at which China has had the ability to catch up with frontier AI research in the US is speeding up.

But DeepSeek is not the only Chinese company to have innovated in spite of the embargo on innovative US innovation. Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and an expert on Chinese AI, said: "If the US federal government thinks all we need to do is crush DeepSeek and after that we'll be OK, then we remain in for an impolite surprise."

In recent weeks, other Chinese technology business have rushed to release their latest AI models, which they claim are on a par with those developed by DeepSeek and OpenAI.

But what are the Chinese AI companies that could match DeepSeek's impact?

Alibaba Cloud

On 29 January, the first day of the lunar brand-new year holiday, leading Chinese technology company Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba, released an upgraded version of its Qwen 2.5 AI design, called Qwen 2.5-Max.

According to Alibaba Cloud, Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms DeepSeek V3 and Meta's Llama 3.1 throughout 11 benchmarks. The company said that it was "filled with self-confidence in the next variation of Qwen 2.5-Max".

Some experts said that the truth that Alibaba Cloud picked to release Qwen 2.5-Max just as companies in China closed for the vacations showed the pressure that DeepSeek has positioned on the domestic market. But Sheehan said it might likewise have actually been an attempt to ride on the wave of publicity for Chinese models produced by DeepSeek's surprise.

Zhipu

Zhipu is a Beijing-based start-up that is backed by Alibaba. Referred to as among China's "AI tigers", it remained in the headlines recently not for its AI accomplishments but for the truth that it was blacklisted by the US government. On 15 January, Zhipu was one of more than two lots Chinese entities contributed to an US limited trade list. Zhipu in specific was included for apparently aiding China's military improvement with its AI development. Zhipu condemned the choice and said it lacked an accurate basis.

Claims about military uplift aside, it is clear that Zhipu's progress in the AI space is fast. Its newest item is AutoGLM, an AI assistant app released in October, which assists users to operate their smart devices with complex voice commands.

Moonshot AI

On the very same day that DeepSeek released its R1 design, 20 January, another Chinese start-up released an LLM that it claimed might likewise challenge OpenAI's o1 on mathematics and reasoning.

Moonshot AI is another Alibaba-backed AI start-up, based in Beijing and valued at $3.3 bn. Unlike Alibaba, a leviathan that was founded in 1999, Moonshot AI is a relative newcomer. Like DeepSeek, it was founded in 2023.

Its offering, Kimi k1.5, is the upgraded variation of Kimi, which was launched in October 2023. It drew in attention for being the very first AI assistant that could process 200,000 Chinese characters in a single prompt. Moonshot AI later said Kimi's capability had been updated to be able to handle 2m Chinese characters.

Moonshot AI "remains in the top echelons of Chinese start-ups", Sheehan said. "It wouldn't shock me at all if Moonshot or Zhipu has a model that equates to or comes close to DeepSeek in performance within the next weeks or months."

ByteDance

Another lunar new year release came from ByteDance, TikTok's parent business. On 29 January it revealed Doubao-1.5-pro, an upgrade to its flagship AI model, which it said might surpass OpenAI's o1 in certain tests.

As well as efficiency, Chinese business are challenging their US competitors on cost. Doubao's most powerful version is priced at 9 yuan per million tokens, bybio.co which is almost half the price of DeepSeek's offering for DeepSeek-R1. For comparison, OpenAI's o1 costs the equivalent of 438 yuan for the same usage.

Tencent

Mainly understood for gaming and WeChat, the common messaging app, Tencent has also made strides in AI. Its flagship model is a text-to-video generator called Hunyuan, which Tencent said can carry out as well as Meta's Llama 3.1.