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/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 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 venture into the field has actually been “years in the making”, said Chen Qiheng, an associated researcher at the Asia Society Policy Institute’s Center for China Analysis.

Private and public financial investments in Chinese AI sped up after ChatGPT removed in 2022 and revealed pledges of real-world organization applications, Chen told CNA.

But it was DeepSeek’s increase that truly “encouraged” the idea that smaller players like start-up firms might have functions to play in AI research and developments, he includes.

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The “emphasis on cost benefit” is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese AI, Chen says, with lower training and inference costs - the expenses of utilizing a trained design to draw conclusions from new information.

2025 might also see the development of more Chinese AI models tackling innovative reasoning tasks.

“We might see some AI firms concentrating on getting closer to artificial basic intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete ways to commercialise their designs and incorporate them with clinical research,” Chen added.

AGI refers to a system with intelligence on par with human capabilities.

Chinese AI business are moving quickly, analysts say, yewiki.org constructing on DeepSeek’s momentum to come up with their own innovative and affordable methods to use generative AI to tasks and develop more advanced products beyond chatbots.

But on the flip side, yewiki.org access to high-end hardware, particularly Nvidia’s advanced AI chips, remains a crucial 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 capability of Chinese tech companies … requiring many to count on older or lower-performance alternatives which can slow training and minimize model abilities,” she said.

“While some business like DeepSeek, have actually discovered innovative methods to enhance or utilize more basic hardware efficiently, obtaining innovative chips still makes a huge distinction for training huge 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 deemed delicate by the state are censored on the internet so it need to come as no surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial disagreements or inform you what occurred in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tests recommend 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 reasoning problems rather!”

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

The automobile attack outside a sports arena in the southern Chinese city was initially greatly censored on Chinese social media - with authorities only revealing the death toll a day later on.

DeepSeek failed to point out that an attack had actually occurred, highlighting instead a military air program and other occasions that had occurred in the city like songs’ day shopping sales in addition to sports and cultural activities.

Dr Zhang believes that it might be a mix of factors at play, such as censorship as well as “a couple of useful constraints”.

“DeepSeek counts on a mix of older graphics processing systems and has actually limited access to advanced hardware which can impact how rapidly and extensively the model can be trained or updated,” she said, pointing to existing US export curbs on China.

“Its strong focus on Chinese-language data may also restrict its adaptability (to carry out) multilingual jobs … As a fairly new product, DeepSeek also hasn’t yet been evaluated as broadly or on the very same scale as more established AI designs which presents additional challenges during real-world implementation.”

When it pertained to Qwen2.5, Alibaba’s chatbot remarkably answered our question about the Zhuhai car attack.

That was after multiple repeated attempts - four prompts to be accurate - in a span of around 20 minutes.

It eventually communicated details about the attack which killed 35 individuals and left lots of others injured, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile