BEIJING (Reuters) – Alibaba’s announcement this week that it will partner with Apple to support iPhones’ artificial intelligence services offering in China has again thrust the spotlight on the country’s AI industry on the heels of DeepSeek.
Following are some of the prominent AI services and their developers to watch in China.
DOUBAO
Developed by ByteDance, a latecomer to the large language model (LLM) market, the namesake chatbot is the most popular consumer AI app in China.
The company’s latest LLM, Doubao-1.5-pro, was released in January and outperforms ChatGPT’s GPT-4 in some metrics.
ByteDance is among the leaders in developing cost-effective LLMs, and its offering is the cheapest available in the market, even more affordable than DeepSeek, according to a Barclays report.
Doubao-1.5 was priced at only 3% to 4% of GPT-4’s pricing.
ByteDance’s low-cost advantage is attributed to its use of the “mixture of experts” (MoE) framework, which is common among various AI models in China, including those of DeepSeek.
QWEN
Developed by e-commerce giant Alibaba, Qwen is the company’s flagship LLM and chatbot.
It was released in March 2023 and has been rated among the top-tier in global benchmarks.
In January, Alibaba releasedQwen 2.5-Max and claimed its functionality surpassed that of highly-acclaimed DeepSeek-V3.
A strong advocate of open AI development, Alibaba announced in September that many of its AI models would be made open-source.
ERNIE
Chinese search giant Baidu was among the first in China to launch a ChatGPT equivalent, Ernie Bot.
Baidu claims its latest model, Ernie 4.0, matches the capabilities of GPT-4.
On February 14, Baidu announced a plan to make its next-generation LLM, Ernie 4.5, open-source from June 30, a major shift in strategy as competition heats up.
HUNYUAN
Tencent released its flagship model Hunyuan in September and launched its chatbot, Yuanbao, in May 2024.
The company’s massive user base, acquired through its popular consumer apps like WeChat, gives Tencent a significant potential advantage in pushing out consumer applications in the future.
Tencent also offers open-source models and advocates for open-source development. Another advantage of Hunyuan is its focus on multi-modality, which includes text, image, and video generation capabilities.
GLM
Zhipu AI developed GLM and claims its latest LLM, GLM4, outperforms GPT-4 in some metrics.
Initially born out of a Tsinghua University laboratory, Zhipu counts Alibaba, Tencent, and the state-owned fund Zhongguancun Science City Innovation Development among its backers.
