Alibaba’s Qwen2-VL and Zhipu’s GLM-4-Flash may not be household names like ChatGPT and Claude, but they’re respective releases this week demonstrate a sharp uptick in the capability of Chinese labs and AI models. Both are frontier class, both are open-weight, and Qwen2-VL tops the leading models from OpenAI and Anthropic in some vision benchmarks.
But to the extent one can generalise about an entire region of over 1.4 billion people, China’s AI landscape is paradoxical. A recent Chinese Communist Party gathering that discussed the nation’s technological future, saw President Xi Jinping reportedly expressing concerns about AI risks. Xi’s supposed apprehensions, highlighted in a recent Economist article, stand in contrast to the nation’s previously stated aspirations to “lead in AI by 2030”.
“China should abandon uninhibited growth that comes at the cost of sacrificing safety,” states a study guide reportedly edited by Xi himself. Yet, the country continues to pour resources and expectation into AI development. The “AI+” initiative, announced in China’s 2024 Government Work Report, is accelerative. This strategy aims to integrate AI across all sectors of the economy, moving beyond isolated applications and high-tech industries, to cover traditional sectors as well, aiming to revolutionise everything from manufacturing and agriculture to healthcare and urban planning.
But AI needs computation, and the US is intent in limiting China’s access to Nvidia’s and other GPUs and plans to step up its controls in the coming months. Of course, Chinese companies are finding creative workarounds, from pre-ban stockpiles, using underground markets, and public cloud services to setting up offshore datacentres. And Huawei has made significant progress with its Ascend 910B chip, which is considered competitive with some lower-end Nvidia models. China may not have many advanced data centres, but it has less restricted access to data and fewer privacy restrictions, especially in areas like public surveillance. Chinese labs capability in vision models is likely not a confidence. As is their multi-lingual strengths with the diversity of non-Western, less Anglo-centric data sets potentially providing a unique advantage.
Also relative to the US and Europe, it has ready access to electricity generation. China can build and connect new power plants, including renewable energy sources, vastly faster than most other states. For example, China ‘centralised’ process has been known to construct and commission a large new power plant in as little as 18 months, versus the many years it takes elsewhere.
China also leads in AI research publication, hosting nine of the top ten institutions globally by publication volume. However, its universities, despite their research output, struggle to match the allure of US institutions. The increasing state control is a drag on morale and research freedoms. As one observer noted, “Tsinghua University, her alma mater, now values officials more than academics.”
Whilst research from China is extensive, it appears to materialise into commercial success less directly than in the US. China outpaces other countries in AI patent filings, but US patents are generally of higher quality. But again, the picture is mixed. In some fields, Chinese companies have been bold in coming to market. Shengshu with Vidu and Kuaishou with Kling have developed text-to-video AI tools comparable to OpenAI’s Sora and have already made them publicly available. These and the other so-called ‘AI tiger’ labs of Baichuan, Zhipu, Moonshot and MiniMax are attracting investors and releasing aggressively.
The regulatory landscape presents its own contradictions. While China has introduced laws to mitigate AI-related scams and safeguard user privacy, it also maintains a relatively light touch in most areas, allowing for the proliferation of open-source models. This openness, however, coexists with reports of heavy censorship in consumer facing applications. There are indications that the Chinese government is particularly concerned about AI’s potential impact on ideological control, with efforts to ensure AI systems align with party ideology. AI chatbots like Xue Xi, have been designed specifically to indoctrinate users with CCP materials.
In the realm of robotics and embodied AI, China is making massive strides. In Wuhan alone, around 500 Baidu-built robotaxis have been deployed, with plans to increase that to 1,000 by year-end. Chinese companies like Xiaomi and UBTech have made significant progress in developing humanoid robots with advanced AI capabilities, leveraging China’s existing global leadership in industrial robot deployment. Again, this progress in industrialised AI contrasts sharply with the challenges faced in semiconductor development.
Takeaways: As China navigates these contradictions, it’s unclear whether it will achieve AI leadership by 2030 (and it’s hard to know what that would even look like!). What’s very clear is that with nearly half the world’s AI researchers and a paradoxical landscape that demands constant innovation, China will unquestionably continue to drive the speed and diversity of global AI progress towards the end of the decade.