China’s attempts to dominate the world of artificial intelligence could be paying off, with industry insiders and technology analysts telling CNBC that Chinese AI models are already hugely popular and are keeping pace with — and even surpassing — those from the U.S. in terms of performance. AI has become the latest battleground between the U.S. and China, with both sides considering it a strategic technology. Washington continues to restrict China’s access to leading-edge chips designed to help power artificial intelligence amid fears that the technology could threaten U.S. national security. It’s led China to pursue its own approach to boosting the appeal and performance of its AI models, including relying on open-sourcing technology and developing its own super-fast software and chips. Like some of the leading U.S. firms in the space, Chinese AI firms are developing so-called large language models, or LLMs, which are trained on huge amounts of data and underpin applications such as chatbots. Unlike OpenAI’s models which power the hugely popular ChatGPT, however, many of these Chinese companies are developing open-source, or open-weight, LLMs which developers can download and build on top of for free and without stringent licensing requirements from the inventor.

Full report : Experts say Chinese AI models are already hugely popular and are keeping pace with — and even surpassing — some of their U.S. counterparts.