From Giants to Underdogs: The Startups Disrupting China’s AI Race

There has been fierce competition among China AI startups with interest in local alternatives, sparked by the launch of ChatGPT in 2022.

Once dominated by the likes of Alibaba and ByteDance, that line too has been attacked with small AI startups breaking the rank and keeping themselves afloat.

Main Contenders in the AI Race

China AI startups – the elite “Six Tigers” which powers its AI domain include Stepfun and Zhipu, Minimax, Moonshot, 01.AI, and Baichuan as they face emerging contenders such as DeepSeek and ModelBest.

Some names, for instance, Minimax and Moonshot, are transitioning to shift their focus away from expensive training of foundational models and developing applications targeted to users while others like Stepfun and Infinigence AI intensify research efforts.

Stepfun

Founded in 2023 by ex-Microsoft executive Jiang Daxin, Stepfun has quickly become a leader in foundational AI models, with backing from Tencent and Shanghai’s government.

Its Step-2 model has over 1 trillion parameters and ranks highly on industry benchmarks.

Modelbest

From Tsinghua University, ModelBest now specializes in efficient small-scale models of AI.

Its MiniCPM 3.0, which has just 4 billion parameters, competes with GPT-3.5 in performance and has attracted millions of funding.

Zhipu

Coming from Tsinghua itself, Zhipu’s AI models comprise ChatGLM and the video-generating engine Ying. The function-theoretical GLM-4-Plus model is quite good as a comparator to GPT-4, but a US trade barrier on the organization has emerged due to its alleged ties to the military.

Infinigence AI

Infinigence was created in 2023 and revolves around AI-thirsty servers, rather than AI models. It uses different brands of chips in AI clusters integrated to enhance training under US chip sanctions.

Honorable Mentions

On top of them all is Baichuan, which is extremely clinical focused in AI. For the consumer market, Talkie by Minimax really rules, whereas an internal milestone for scaling is the Kimi bot by Moonshot with more than 13 million users.

China’s AI Boom: A Shift in the Landscape

Evolution of AI industry in China is from sprint to marathon. Big corporations rule the Asian market; however, some startups, such as DeepSeek and even ModelBest, have proven that agility and specialization can also rival scale. The competition to dominate AI is just igniting.

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