China’s Top 9 AI Models and Startups

The United States has for years used its trade clout to slow China’s rise in advanced chipmaking technology — but that hasn’t stopped the country from creating its own competitors in the AI ​​race.

While some advanced chips and access to many AI models developed in the West are not available in China (due to both U.S. and Chinese government trade restrictions), some of the leading tech companies have been able to develop their own chips and models, including Baidu, whose Ernie Bot is considered a Chinese version of ChatGPT (which is not available in the country). China also has a burgeoning AI startup scene, which some AI researchers in the U.S. say is not all that bad.

Now, OpenAI reportedly plans to restrict access to its application programming interface, or API — the platform that lets other product developers build on OpenAI’s technology — to countries including China, which could limit AI development there, as many Chinese startups have been able to build on the company’s API. But it could also be a boost for Chinese tech companies to step up their AI development efforts.

Explore China’s top AI models and startups.

Baidu — Ernie 4.0

Chinese tech giant Baidu, which has the largest share of the search engine market in the country, announced the latest version of its AI model, Ernie 4.0, in October. Ernie 4.0, said Robin Li, Baidu’s CEO, can understand complex questions and use reason and logic to generate answers. “It’s not inferior to GPT-4 in any way,” Li said, according to the Associated Press.

Ernie Bot It was first released in March last year and could “interact in dialogue, create content, reason with knowledge, and generate multiple output modes,” according to Baidu. Ernie Bot was built on Baidu’s large language model (LLM), ERNIE, which has been in development since 2019.

Meanwhile, Baidu has designed its own AI chip called Kunlun 3, which will soon begin production at TSMC, The Information reported, citing an anonymous person familiar with the matter.

Alibaba Cloud — Qwen 2

Alibaba Cloud, a cloud computing subsidiary of Alibaba Group, released its latest series of large language models (LLMs) called Qwen 2 in June and said it has “ranked first in the open LLM rankings.”

The Qwen 2 series outperformed other leading models in 15 benchmarks, including language understanding, coding and reasoning, Alibaba said. The models were trained in 29 languages, including German and Arabic, and also outperformed them in multilingual capabilities.

In September, Alibaba released more than 100 new open-source AI models from the Qwen 2.5 model family. It also released a text-to-video model as part of an image generation model family called Tongyi Wanxiang.

Alibaba said the new Qwen 2.5 models, which range in size from 0.5 billion to 72 billion parameters, offer “expanded knowledge and greater capabilities” in subjects such as math and coding, and support more than 29 languages.

ByteDance — Doubao

TikTok parent ByteDance released its AI-powered chatbot Doubao in August — and it’s proving to be a tough competitor to Baidu’s Ernie Bot. In China, Doubao surpassed Ernie Bot in downloads last year and has more monthly active users on iOS, Bloomberg reported.

In May, ByteDance introduced a series of Doubao large language (LLM) models for enterprises that cost less than models from competitors. The family of models consists of at least eight models, including the Doubao Pro and Doubao Lite.

ByteDance has designed two integrated circuits in collaboration with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, the mass production of which is scheduled to begin in 2026, The Information reported, citing anonymous people familiar with the matter.

Tencent — Hunyuan

Chinese internet and technology company Tencent unveiled its proprietary foundation model, Hunyuan, in September, which it said can generate images and text, among other functions. Hunyuan has been made available to enterprises for testing and developing applications. The foundation model has “strong Chinese language processing capabilities, advanced logical reasoning, and reliable task execution capabilities,” Tencent said.

AI Moonshot – Ohai, Noisee and Kimi

Moonshot AI, a startup based in Beijing, has reportedly had a hand in bringing AI products to the U.S. market, including a role-playing chat app called Ohai and a music video generator called Noisee, according to The Information. However, a spokesperson for the startup told the publication that it has no current plans to develop or release the products outside of China.

In China, Moonshot, one of the country’s most valuable AI startups, has a popular chatbot called Kimi. The chatbot launched last October and is powered by the startup’s large language model (LLM), also called Kimi.

MiniMax – Talkies

Shanghai-based AI startup MiniMax has also entered the U.S. market with an AI character chatbot called Talkie. The chatbot, which is the Chinese version of the U.S.-based Character.ai, had nearly 2.2 million visits worldwide from March to May, according to Similarweb.

Kuaishou — Blade

Chinese tech company Kuaishou released the first free text-to-video model, Kling, in June. The model “transforms text prompts into high-quality AI videos that closely mimic the complex movement patterns and physical characteristics of the real world,” Kuaishou says.

iFlytek – Spark V4.0

iFlytek, a partially state-owned IT company, released its iFlytek Spark Big Model V4.0 in June. The new model has “comprehensively improved its seven core capabilities” and has been tested against the GPT-4 Turbo, the company said, adding that it ranked first in eight international mainstream tests. The Spark Big Model V4.0 outperformed the GPT-4 Turbo in benchmarks including language comprehension, logical reasoning and math ability, iFlytek said.

Zhipu AI

Beijing-based Zhipu AI was founded in 2019 and has a series of AI products, including a chatbot and a visual language foundation model. The startup was one of the first Chinese AI companies to receive government approval to make its models publicly available, and its backers include Alibaba, Tencent and Saudi Arabia’s Prosperity7 Ventures, according to Bloomberg.

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