DeepSeek’s release of an artificial intelligence design that could duplicate the performance of OpenAI’s o1 at a fraction of the expense has shocked investors and analysts. Markets reeled as Nvidia, astroberry.io a microchip and AI firm, shed more than $500bn in market price in a record one-day loss for any business on Wall Street. Investors feared that DeepSeek challenged the dominance of US AI leaders.

Donald Trump explained DeepSeek as a “wake-up call”. In China, DeepSeek’s creator, Liang Wenfeng, has actually been hailed as a national hero and was invited to go to a seminar chaired by China’s premier, Li Qiang. The pace at which China has had the ability to capture up with frontier AI research in the US is speeding up.

But DeepSeek is not the only Chinese company to have actually innovated regardless of the embargo on advanced US technology. Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a professional on Chinese AI, said: “If the US federal government thinks all we need to do is crush DeepSeek and after that we’ll be OK, then we remain in for an impolite surprise.“

In current weeks, other Chinese innovation companies have rushed to release their newest AI designs, which they claim are on a par with those developed by DeepSeek and OpenAI.

But what are the Chinese AI companies that could match DeepSeek’s effect?

Alibaba Cloud

On 29 January, the very first day of the lunar new year holiday, leading Chinese innovation company Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba, launched an upgraded variation of its Qwen 2.5 AI design, called Qwen 2.5-Max.

According to Alibaba Cloud, Qwen 2.5-Max surpasses DeepSeek V3 and Meta’s Llama 3.1 throughout 11 criteria. The company said that it was “loaded with self-confidence in the next version of Qwen 2.5-Max”.

Some experts said that the fact that Alibaba Cloud chose to launch Qwen 2.5-Max just as services in China closed for the vacations reflected the pressure that DeepSeek has actually placed on the domestic market. But Sheehan said it may likewise have been an effort to ride on the wave of publicity for Chinese models created by DeepSeek’s surprise.

Zhipu

Zhipu is a Beijing-based start-up that is backed by Alibaba. Called among China’s “AI tigers”, it remained in the headlines just recently not for its AI achievements but for the fact that it was blacklisted by the US federal government. On 15 January, Zhipu was one of more than 2 dozen Chinese entities added to an US restricted trade list. Zhipu in specific was included for apparently aiding China’s military development with its AI development. Zhipu condemned the decision and said it did not have a factual basis.

Claims about military uplift aside, it is clear that Zhipu’s development in the AI area is fast. Its latest product is AutoGLM, an AI assistant app released in October, which assists users to run their smartphones with complex voice commands.

Moonshot AI

On the exact same day that DeepSeek launched its R1 model, 20 January, another Chinese start-up released an LLM that it claimed might also challenge OpenAI’s o1 on mathematics and reasoning.

Moonshot AI is another Alibaba-backed AI start-up, based in Beijing and valued at $3.3 bn. Unlike Alibaba, a leviathan that was founded in 1999, Moonshot AI is a relative beginner. Like DeepSeek, it was established in 2023.

Its offering, Kimi k1.5, is the updated version of Kimi, which was released in October 2023. It brought in attention for being the first AI assistant that could process 200,000 Chinese characters in a single timely. Moonshot AI later said Kimi’s capability had actually been upgraded to be able to deal with 2m Chinese characters.

Moonshot AI “remains in the top tiers of Chinese start-ups”, Sheehan said. “It wouldn’t amaze me at all if Moonshot or Zhipu has a model that equates to or comes close to DeepSeek in efficiency within the next weeks or months.“

ByteDance

Another lunar new year release came from ByteDance, and dad business. On 29 January it unveiled Doubao-1.5-pro, an upgrade to its flagship AI design, which it said might outshine OpenAI’s o1 in certain tests.

In addition to efficiency, Chinese business are challenging their US competitors on price. Doubao’s most effective version is priced at 9 yuan per million tokens, kenpoguy.com which is almost half the rate of DeepSeek’s offering for DeepSeek-R1. For comparison, OpenAI’s o1 costs the equivalent of 438 yuan for the exact same usage.

Tencent

Mainly understood for video gaming and WeChat, sitiosecuador.com the ubiquitous messaging app, Tencent has actually also made strides in AI. Its flagship design is a text-to-video generator called Hunyuan, which Tencent said can carry out in addition to Meta’s Llama 3.1.