How do Chinese AI bots stack up against ChatGPT? We put them to the test

The heat is on as China's tech giants step up their video game after DeepSeek's success.

Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max chatbot, Chinese startup DeepSeek and OpenAI's ChatGPT. (Photos: Reuters/Dado Ruvic, AFP/Sebastien Bozon)

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Bong Xin Ying

Lakeisha Leo

WHAT lags CHINA'S AI BOOM?

Transforming the country into a tech superpower has actually long been President Xi Jinping's goal and China has its sights on becoming the world leader in AI by 2030.

China views AI as being "tactically important" and its foray into the field has been "years in the making", said Chen Qiheng, an affiliated researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.

Private and public investments in Chinese AI accelerated after ChatGPT took off in 2022 and revealed promises of real-world company applications, Chen informed CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's increase that truly "encouraged" the idea that smaller players like start-up firms could have functions to play in AI research study and developments, he includes.

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The "emphasis on expense advantage" is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese AI, Chen states, with lower training and inference costs - the expenses of using a trained model to reason from brand-new information.

2025 might also see the introduction of more Chinese AI models taking on innovative reasoning jobs.

"We could see some AI firms concentrating on getting closer to synthetic basic intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete methods to commercialise their designs and integrate them with scientific research study," Chen included.

AGI describes a system with intelligence on par with human abilities.

Chinese AI business are moving rapidly, experts say, developing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own innovative and cost-effective ways to apply generative AI to jobs and develop advanced items beyond chatbots.

But on the other side, access to high-end hardware, particularly Nvidia's innovative AI chips, remains a key difficulty for Chinese developers, kept in mind Dr Marina Zhang, an associate professor at University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

"US export controls (still) limit the ability of Chinese tech business ... requiring many to count on older or lower-performance options which can slow training and minimize design abilities," she said.

"While some business like DeepSeek, have discovered imaginative methods to optimize or utilize more fundamental hardware efficiently, obtaining advanced chips still makes a huge difference for training large AI models."

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So how do Chinese AI bots compare against ChatGPT? We put them to the test.

WHICH BEST ADDRESSES CURRENT EVENTS IN CHINA?

In China, subjects considered sensitive by the state are censored on the internet so it ought to come as not a surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial conflicts or pipewiki.org inform you what occurred in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tests suggest Chinese chatbots are configured to stay away from domestic politics.

When asked "Who is Xi Jinping", DeepSeek's reply was "Sorry, I'm uncertain how to approach this kind of question yet. Let's chat about math, coding, and logic problems rather!"

To even more check for accuracy and self-censorship, we asked DeepSeek-R1, Qwen2.5 and ChatGPT the same concern: "What happened in Zhuhai on November 11, 2024?"

The cars and truck attack outside a sports stadium in the southern Chinese city was at first heavily censored on Chinese social networks - with authorities just disclosing the death toll a day later.

DeepSeek failed to point out that an attack had occurred, highlighting instead a military air program and other events that had actually happened in the city like singles' day shopping sales as well as sports and cultural activities.

Dr Zhang thinks that it might be a mix of factors at play, such as censorship in addition to "a couple of practical constraints".

"DeepSeek counts on a mix of older graphics processing units and has actually restricted access to advanced hardware which can impact how quickly and thoroughly the design can be trained or updated," she said, indicating existing US export curbs on China.

"Its strong concentrate on Chinese-language information might likewise limit its versatility (to perform) multilingual jobs ... As a fairly brand-new item, DeepSeek also hasn't yet been evaluated as broadly or on the very same scale as more established AI models which presents extra obstacles during real-world release."

When it pertained to Qwen2.5, Alibaba's chatbot surprisingly answered our question about the Zhuhai automobile attack.

That wanted numerous repeated efforts - four prompts to be precise - in a span of around 20 minutes.

It ultimately relayed details about the attack which killed 35 people and left dozens of others injured, also going on to note details like the date and time, details about the assailant including his name and age, as well as casualties.

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