Around the Spring Festival, DeepSeek captured headlines worldwide, its high performance and low cost challenging conventional beliefs and prompting reflection on the optimal path for AI development. The 'brute force' approach exemplified by OpenAI faced scrutiny as DeepSeek emerged as a formidable contender.

Observing a part reveals the whole. Keen foreign media outlets noted China's comprehensive AI rise beyond DeepSeek. The Wall Street Journal recently published an article titled "It’s Not Just DeepSeek. A Guide to the Chinese AI Companies You Need to Know," urging Americans to pay attention to China's leading large model companies.

The article classifies these companies into two types: technology giants and startups. Among startups, DeepSeek and Stepfun garnered significant attention, while Alibaba and Baidu, as technology giants, became key research objects. The Wall Street Journal emphasized that Baidu was the first in China to launch ERNIE Bot, a generative AI for the public, which now boasts 430 million users.

01 Comprehensive Rise: A Hundred Schools of Thought in China's Large Models

China's AI didn't suddenly match the US; DeepSeek's popularity was a qualitative change from long-term investments. In the OpenAI era, China's large models quietly entered a stage of diverse growth. DeepSeek, founded in 2023, released R1 during this year's Spring Festival, surprising the world with a product comparable to OpenAI's cutting-edge models, all at no cost.

Large companies, with robust technical foundations and resource mobilization capabilities, build comprehensive infrastructures or integrate applications into existing product matrices. Kuaishou's Koling AI excels in text-to-image and image-to-video generation, supporting one-click video continuation. Doubao, from ByteDance, supports multimodal information interaction, enhancing social experience functions. Since the mobile era, Chinese tech enterprises have excelled in scene applications, proven again in Kuaishou and ByteDance's large model R&D.

More prominent is Baidu, leading China's AI industry. Baidu has made foundational technological innovations, promoting AI growth through algorithms and computing power. Its "large model technology" won the Leading Science and Technology Award at the World Internet Conference for two consecutive years, leading Chinese language processing. Baidu has also opened up this capability to society, with the AI developer platform as the core, extending AI capabilities to various fields. Baidu's large models are increasingly applied widely. ERNIE Bot, launched soon after ChatGPT, leverages Baidu's advantages in search and cloud computing, becoming a large model with superior technical accumulation, application implementation, and open platforms in China.

China's AI industry has taken a different path from the US, focusing on large models, cultivating application scenarios, and achieving multi-point technological innovation. DeepSeek's popularity finally recognized this path globally, revealing closer AI capabilities between China and the US than anticipated.

02 The Source of Foreign Media Panic

DeepSeek's unexpected innovation capabilities caused upheaval in the US. NVIDIA's stock price fell by 17%, the US Congress demanded White House attention, and smear campaigns emerged. Even hackers attacked DeepSeek's servers. However, "saying no but doing yes" prevailed; Microsoft, Amazon, and NVIDIA integrated the DeepSeek-R1 model. The Associated Press published an article titled "DeepSeek has rattled the AI industry. Here’s a quick look at other Chinese AI models," stating that under chip restrictions, China may have surpassed the US in AI, with DeepSeek disrupting the industry's rhythm. The article specifically mentioned Baidu, ByteDance, and Alibaba, expressing Western concerns.

The US fears China's AI industry, represented by DeepSeek, for two reasons: information security threats and anxiety about sustaining dominance. The US government views advanced technology, open source, and low cost as a "winning combination." If American companies and citizens choose cheap, easy-to-use, open-source large models from China, it will significantly impact information security. Achieving high-level products with low-cost investments means Chinese enterprises have defeated or at least matched US enterprises nourished by huge funds, eroding long-term US technological superiority confidence.

In other words, Chinese AI enterprises have demonstrated strong innovation capabilities, and their alternative path and latecomer advantage are likely to make leaders uneasy.

DeepSeek's story of rivaling US companies with millions of dollars of investment for just $6 million is well-known. Baidu's innovative Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, leveraging search advantages, significantly improves generated content relevance and accuracy, solving traditional generative models' "nonsense" issues. For individual users, this optimizes the question-answering experience, avoiding wrong conclusions. For enterprise users, it enhances services like intelligent customer service and knowledge graphs.

Taking advantage of the Spring Festival, the author conducted comparative tests between ERNIE Bot with RAG capabilities and ChatGPT's 4o model, analyzing performance differences and exploring scenarios. ERNIE Bot accurately answered questions about the latest Spring Festival movies, Gala programs, etc., meeting users' latest information needs. ChatGPT-4o, while versatile and supporting multimodal interaction, struggled with information retrieval and generation, exposing shortcomings. The following figure shows an intuitive comparison of the two facing the same question (above is ERNIE Bot, below is ChatGPT), with obvious result differences.

Even for softer questions like "word-of-mouth," ERNIE Bot gave factual answers; ChatGPT gave completely wrong conclusions.

ERNIE Bot accurately answered factual questions; ChatGPT seriously changed the subject.

For historical events, ERNIE Bot gave concise, accurate answers; ChatGPT's answer was loosely structured and informationally wrong, with Russia ranking fourth and South Korea fifth on the medal table.

This comparative test on recent, US-related, and long-term events shows ERNIE Bot's advantages over ChatGPT-4o in information retrieval and generation, especially for topics with timeliness and local characteristics. This discovery provides an important reference for users and new directions for AI development, promoting continuous exploration and innovation within the industry.

03 The Era of Parallel Advancement Between China and the US May Create Greater Dividends for AI

Should we panic about the transition from US dominance to China-US neck-and-neck competition? No. This change may bring a new situation in the AI industry. Healthy competition and appropriate pressure drive industry development and progress. Although some US media and AI practitioners show vigilance and panic, China's AI rise is a huge benefit to the entire industry.

Recently, Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg praised DeepSeek for its "novel advancements" in infrastructure optimization, believing Meta could benefit. Earlier, Apple CEO Tim Cook also believed DeepSeek drove efficiency innovation, clearly a positive development.

Whether it's DeepSeek's impact on cost control and open-source code or Baidu's underlying technological innovations, these innovations benefit not just enterprises but the entire industry. People used to unconditionally recognize OpenAI's massive computing power and data investment model. However, since this Spring Festival, people are considering better options, opening up new ideas and reducing resource waste. Baidu's accumulations in RAG and Chinese natural language processing can provide important reference and inspiration for optimizing mainstream large models in the US.

OpenAI plans to launch the GPT-03 model in 2025, and Baidu will release ERNIE 5.0 that year. More AI enterprises from China and the US are brewing significant actions. In 2025, the China-US race may become the AI field's main theme. This differs from previous one-sided dominance. Diversified growth paths and the collision and integration of different ideas will definitely bring more possibilities to the entire industry.