Report: China’s Chance of Surpassing US AI Giants is No More Than 20%

Source: Al Arabiya Business

Top Chinese AI researchers believe the likelihood of domestic firms overtaking American titans like OpenAI and Google DeepMind within the next 3 to 5 years remains limited, citing a massive gap in infrastructure and computing power. Lin Junyang of Alibaba’s Qwen team described a 20% probability as an "optimistic estimate," noting that U.S. computing resources outsize China's by twofold.

Language Models and Infrastructure: Tang Jie, co-founder of Zhipu AI, noted that the gap in Large Language Models (LLMs) is widening, as the U.S. holds advanced proprietary models not yet public. Meanwhile, Yao Shunyu of Tencent pointed out that while China excels at maximizing performance from limited GPUs, it lacks the high-precision EUV lithography machines needed for cutting-edge hardware. Despite this, there is hope in a new generation of risk-taking researchers born in the 1990s and 2000s, who are driving breakthroughs like DeepSeek’s low-cost models.