- Since 2023, China’s academia and industries have made significant breakthroughs, leading to a proliferation of open-source and closed-source LLMs across various sectors. Key companies have invested heavily in manpower, computing power, and data resources for their LLM development.
- Since August last year, Beijing has mandated regulatory approval for tech firms before publicizing LLMs, reflecting the government’s strategic emphasis on strong control over AI development. Beijing has now approved 45+ AI models for deployment, highlighting its efforts to narrow the AI gap with the U.S.
- In China’s LLM market, startups and tech giants are competing fiercely. According to SuperCLUE’s analysis, startups account for 57.14 percent, while tech giants account for 42.86 percent of the current number of LLMs in China.
- Technology giants such as Baidu, Alibaba, and ByteDance are leading the way. They can build on a stable, long-term investment in cloud computing and data resources, giving them an advantage over startups.
- Among China’s AI startups, Moonshot has attracted considerable attention from both the capital markets and AI chatbot users. In March 2024, Moonshot announced a major breakthrough: its updated Kimi chatbot can now process up to 2 million Chinese characters in a single prompt, surpassing the capabilities of all other existing AI tools.
- In Chinese language processing, Chinese companies are narrowing the gap with GPT-4. Meanwhile, Chinese companies are also targeting other global markets. Late last year, for example, Alibaba launched an LLM tailored to Southeast Asian languages.
Sinolytics is a research-based business consultancy entirely focused on China. It advises European companies on their strategic orientation and specific business activities in the People’s Republic.