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 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 long been President Xi Jinping's objective and China has its sights on ending up being the world leader in AI by 2030.

China views AI as being "strategically essential" and its venture into the field has 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 accelerated after ChatGPT removed in 2022 and revealed promises of real-world business applications, Chen informed CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's rise that really "encouraged" the concept 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 benefit" is a distinctive feature of Chinese AI, Chen states, with lower training and costs - the costs of using a trained model to reason from new data.

2025 could also see the development of more Chinese AI designs taking on sophisticated reasoning jobs.

"We could see some AI companies concentrating on getting closer to artificial general intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete methods to commercialise their models and incorporate them with clinical research study," Chen added.

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

Chinese AI business are moving quickly, analysts state, building on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own ingenious and cost-effective methods to use generative AI to jobs and establish advanced products beyond chatbots.

But on the flip side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia's advanced AI chips, remains an essential hurdle for Chinese designers, kept in mind Dr Marina Zhang, an associate teacher at University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

"US export controls (still) restrict the ability of Chinese tech companies ... requiring lots of to count on older or lower-performance alternatives which can slow training and reduce model abilities," she said.

"While some companies like DeepSeek, have found imaginative methods to optimize or utilize more standard hardware effectively, obtaining innovative chips still makes a big difference for training really big 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, subjects deemed sensitive by the state are censored on the internet so it should come as no surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial disputes or inform you what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tests suggest Chinese chatbots are programmed to guide clear of 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 instead!"

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

The vehicle attack outside a sports arena in the southern Chinese city was initially greatly censored on Chinese social networks - with authorities just disclosing the death toll a day later on.

DeepSeek failed to discuss that an attack had taken place, highlighting rather a military air show and [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile