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 video game after DeepSeek's success.

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

This audio is produced by an AI tool.

Bong Xin Ying

Lakeisha Leo

WHAT'S BEHIND CHINA'S AI BOOM?

Transforming the country into a tech superpower has long been President Xi Jinping's goal and China has its sights on ending up being the world leader in AI by 2030.

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

and public investments in Chinese AI sped up after ChatGPT took off in 2022 and revealed pledges of real-world service applications, Chen told CNA.

But it was DeepSeek's rise that really "urged" the concept that smaller gamers like start-up firms could have functions to play in AI research and advancements, he adds.

'A lot is up in the air': Is Chinese company DeepSeek's AI design as impactful as it claims?

Commentary: DeepSeek - how a Chinese AI business just changed the rules of tech-geopolitics

The "focus on cost benefit" is a distinguishing characteristic of Chinese AI, Chen says, with lower training and inference expenses - the costs of using a trained model to reason from new information.

2025 might likewise see the emergence of more Chinese AI designs tackling sophisticated reasoning jobs.

"We might see some AI companies focusing on getting closer to artificial basic intelligence (AGI) while others focus on concrete ways to commercialise their models and incorporate them with scientific research study," Chen included.

AGI describes a system with intelligence on par with human abilities.

Chinese AI business are moving quickly, analysts state, constructing on DeepSeek's momentum to come up with their own ingenious and cost-efficient ways to apply generative AI to tasks and develop advanced products beyond chatbots.

But on the other side, access to high-end hardware, especially Nvidia's sophisticated AI chips, remains an essential obstacle for Chinese developers, kept in mind Dr Marina Zhang, higgledy-piggledy.xyz an associate teacher at University of Technology Sydney's (UTS) Australia-China Relations Institute.

"US export controls (still) limit the ability of Chinese tech business ... requiring lots of to depend on older or lower-performance alternatives which can slow training and minimize design capabilities," she said.

"While some business like DeepSeek, have actually discovered imaginative ways to enhance or use more fundamental hardware effectively, obtaining advanced chips still makes a big distinction for training huge AI designs."

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

WHICH BEST ADDRESSES CURRENT EVENTS IN CHINA?

In China, subjects deemed delicate by the state are censored on the web so it must come as not a surprise that Chinese-made chatbots will not acknowledge territorial conflicts or tell you what occurred in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Tests recommend Chinese chatbots are programmed to avoid domestic politics.

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

To further evaluate for precision and self-censorship, we asked DeepSeek-R1, bytes-the-dust.com Qwen2.5 and ChatGPT the exact same question: "What occurred in Zhuhai on November 11, 2024?"

The vehicle attack outside a sports stadium in the southern Chinese city was at first heavily censored on Chinese social networks - with authorities only divulging the death toll a day later on.

DeepSeek failed to point out that an attack had happened, highlighting instead a military air show and other occasions that had occurred in the city like songs' day shopping sales in addition to sports and cultural activities.

Dr Zhang believes that it might be a mix of aspects at play, such as censorship along with "a couple of useful constraints".

"DeepSeek relies on a mix of older graphics processing systems and has limited access to innovative hardware which can affect how rapidly and thoroughly the design can be trained or updated," she said, pointing to existing US export curbs on China.

"Its strong concentrate on Chinese-language data may also restrict its versatility (to perform) multilingual tasks ... As a fairly new product, DeepSeek also hasn't yet been evaluated as broadly or on the exact same scale as more established AI designs which positions extra challenges during real-world release."

When it pertained to Qwen2.5, Alibaba's chatbot surprisingly addressed our concern about the Zhuhai automobile attack.

That was after several repeated efforts - four prompts to be accurate - in a period of around 20 minutes.

It ultimately passed on details about the attack which eliminated 35 individuals and left dozens of others injured, likewise going on to list details like the date and time, details about the assailant including his name and age, as well as casualties.

However, it composed that "the police are conducting a thorough examination into the motives and situations surrounding the event", details which is now outdated.

The driver, Fan, was executed last month.

This is Qwen2.5's response completely:

Answer: On Nov 11, [forum.batman.gainedge.org](https://forum.batman.gainedge.org/index.php?action=profile