How do Chinese AI bots stack up against ChatGPT? We put them to the test

The heat is on as China's tech giants step up their game after DeepSeek's success.

Alibaba's Qwen2.5-Max chatbot, Chinese start-up DeepSeek and OpenAI's ChatGPT. (Photos: Reuters/Dado Ruvic, AFP/Sebastien Bozon)

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Bong Xin Ying

Lakeisha Leo

WHAT lags CHINA'S AI BOOM?

Transforming the nation into a tech superpower has actually long been President Xi Jinping's objective and China has its sights on becoming the world leader in AI by 2030.

China views AI as being "strategically important" and its foray into the field has been "years in the making", said Chen Qiheng, an affiliated scientist at the Asia Society Policy Institute's Center for China Analysis.

Private and public investments in Chinese AI sped up after ChatGPT removed in 2022 and revealed promises of real-world service applications, Chen told CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's rise that actually "urged" the idea that smaller players like start-up companies might have functions to play in AI research study and developments, he adds.

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The "emphasis on expense benefit" is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese AI, Chen states, with lower training and inference expenses - the costs of utilizing a trained design to reason from new data.

2025 could also see the emergence of more Chinese AI designs tackling innovative reasoning jobs.

"We could see some AI firms focusing on getting closer to synthetic basic intelligence (AGI) while others concentrate on concrete methods to commercialise their designs and incorporate them with scientific research," Chen added.

AGI refers to a system with intelligence on par with human abilities.

Chinese AI business are moving rapidly, experts state, developing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own innovative and cost-effective ways to apply generative AI to jobs and develop advanced items beyond chatbots.

But on the flip side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia's sophisticated AI chips, remains a key difficulty for Chinese designers, noted Dr Marina Zhang, an associate teacher at University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

"US export controls (still) restrict the capability of Chinese tech companies ... forcing lots of to rely on older or lower-performance options which can slow training and minimize model capabilities," she said.

"While some companies like DeepSeek, have discovered creative methods to enhance or utilize more standard hardware efficiently, obtaining cutting-edge chips still makes a big difference for training really big AI models."

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So how do Chinese AI bots match up against ChatGPT? We put them to the test.

WHICH BEST ADDRESSES CURRENT EVENTS IN CHINA?

In China, topics deemed delicate by the state are censored on the web so it must come as no surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial disputes or tell you what happened in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tests suggest Chinese chatbots are configured to stay away from domestic politics.

When asked "Who is Xi Jinping", DeepSeek's reply was "Sorry, I'm uncertain how to approach this type of concern yet. Let's chat about mathematics, coding, and logic problems instead!"

To even more test for accuracy and self-censorship, we asked DeepSeek-R1, Qwen2.5 and ChatGPT the same concern: "What occurred in Zhuhai on November 11, 2024?"

The automobile attack outside a sports arena in the southern Chinese city was at first heavily censored on Chinese social networks - with authorities just revealing the death toll a day later on.

DeepSeek failed to mention that an attack had occurred, highlighting rather a military air show and other occasions that had actually taken place in the city like songs' day shopping sales in addition to sports and cultural activities.

Dr Zhang thinks that it might be a mix of factors at play, such as censorship as well as "a few useful constraints".

"DeepSeek depends on a mix of older graphics processing systems and has actually restricted access to cutting-edge hardware which can affect how quickly and extensively the model can be trained or updated," she said, indicating existing US export curbs on China.

"Its strong concentrate on Chinese-language information might also limit its versatility (to carry out) multilingual tasks ... As a fairly new item, DeepSeek also hasn't yet been tested as broadly or on the exact same scale as more established AI models which poses additional obstacles throughout real-world release."

When it pertained to Qwen2.5, bytes-the-dust.com Alibaba's chatbot remarkably answered our concern about the Zhuhai automobile attack.

That sought multiple duplicated attempts - four prompts to be precise - in a span of around 20 minutes.

It ultimately communicated details about the attack which eliminated 35 people and left lots of others injured, wiki.asexuality.org also going on to note details like the date and time, details about the assailant including his name and age, in addition to casualties.

However, it composed that "the police are carrying out an extensive examination into the intentions and circumstances surrounding the event", details which is now dated.

The motorist, Fan, was performed last month.

This is Qwen2.5's action in full:

Answer: On Nov 11, 2024, a significant and awful event occurred in Zhuhai, wiki.asexuality.org China. According to several news sources, a guy named Fan Weiqiu (樊某, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile