The two most important artificial intelligence ecosystems in the world are the US and China. Geopolitical tensions make it tempting to view the pair in opposition. Chinese AI has been described as both lagging and leading the US. In fact, the two countries are pursuing distinct strategies. 

Admittedly, this is partly due to necessity. Since US start-up OpenAI launched chatbot ChatGPT in November 2022, the world has been consumed by a fevered race to build the large language models that fuel generative AI. China is handicapped in this race by two factors: lack of access to advanced US chips and censorship of information.

Without advanced chips, China’s compute power is constrained. Companies like OpenAI are expanding the size of their models. GPT-4, OpenAI’s latest flagship model, is reported to be trained on more than 1tn parameters. Chinese companies must instead focus on efficiency. Hangzhou-based DeepSeek, for example, released DeepSeek-V2 this year, an open-source large language model that uses 21bn active parameters.