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 game after DeepSeek's success.

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

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Bong Xin Ying

Lakeisha Leo

WHAT'S BEHIND CHINA'S AI BOOM?

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

China views AI as being "strategically crucial" and its foray into the field has actually 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 financial investments in Chinese AI accelerated after ChatGPT took off in 2022 and showed pledges of real-world service applications, Chen informed CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's increase that actually "encouraged" the idea that smaller sized gamers like start-up companies could have functions to play in AI research and advancements, he includes.

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

2025 could likewise see the introduction of more Chinese AI models dealing with sophisticated reasoning jobs.

"We could see some AI companies focusing on getting closer to synthetic basic intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete ways to commercialise their designs and integrate them with scientific research," Chen added.

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

Chinese AI companies are moving rapidly, experts say, developing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own innovative and economical ways to apply generative AI to tasks and develop more advanced items beyond chatbots.

But on the other side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia's innovative AI chips, remains a key obstacle for Chinese designers, 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 companies ... forcing lots of to depend on older or lower-performance alternatives which can slow training and reduce model abilities," she said.

"While some business like DeepSeek, have actually discovered innovative methods to enhance or utilize more basic hardware effectively, obtaining innovative chips still makes a big distinction for training large AI designs."

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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, topics considered sensitive by the state are censored on the web so it should come as not a surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial disputes or tell you what occurred in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tests suggest Chinese chatbots are set to avoid domestic politics.

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

To even more evaluate for precision and raovatonline.org self-censorship, we asked DeepSeek-R1, Qwen2.5 and ChatGPT the exact same question: "What took place in Zhuhai on November 11, 2024?"

The automobile attack outside a sports arena in the southern Chinese city was at first heavily censored on Chinese social media - with authorities just revealing the death toll a day later on.

DeepSeek failed to point out that an attack had taken location, highlighting rather a military air show and other events that had actually taken place in the city like songs' day shopping sales in addition to sports and cultural activities.

Dr Zhang believes that it may be a mix of aspects at play, such as censorship as well as "a couple of practical constraints".

"DeepSeek depends on a mix of older graphics processing units and has restricted access to innovative hardware which can impact how rapidly and extensively the design can be trained or updated," she said, raovatonline.org pointing to existing US export curbs on China.

"Its strong concentrate on Chinese-language information may likewise restrict its adaptability (to perform) multilingual tasks ... As a fairly new item, DeepSeek likewise hasn't yet been checked as broadly or on the same scale as more established AI models which poses additional challenges throughout real-world deployment."

When it pertained to Qwen2.5, Alibaba's chatbot remarkably addressed our question about the Zhuhai cars and truck attack.

That wanted multiple repeated attempts - four triggers to be accurate - in a span of around 20 minutes.

It ultimately communicated details about the attack which killed 35 people and left dozens of others injured, likewise going on to list details like the date and time, details about the assailant including his name and age, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile