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DeepSeek's release of a synthetic intelligence design that might duplicate the performance of OpenAI's o1 at a fraction of the expense has stunned investors and analysts. Markets reeled as Nvidia, a microchip and AI firm, shed more than $500bn in market value in a record one-day loss for any business on Wall Street. Investors feared that DeepSeek challenged the supremacy of US AI leaders.

Donald Trump explained DeepSeek as a "wake-up call". In China, DeepSeek's founder, Liang Wenfeng, has been hailed as a national hero and was welcomed to participate in a symposium chaired by China's premier, Li Qiang. The rate at which China has had the ability to capture up with frontier AI research in the US is accelerating.

But DeepSeek is not the only Chinese company to have actually innovated despite the embargo on advanced US innovation. Matt Sheehan, a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and a on Chinese AI, said: "If the US government believes all we require to do is squash DeepSeek and then we'll be OK, then we remain in for a disrespectful surprise."

In recent weeks, other Chinese technology companies have rushed to release their newest AI models, which they claim are on a par with those developed by DeepSeek and OpenAI.

But what are the Chinese AI business that could match DeepSeek's effect?

Alibaba Cloud

On 29 January, the first day of the lunar brand-new year holiday, leading Chinese technology business Alibaba Cloud, a subsidiary of Alibaba, launched an updated version of its Qwen 2.5 AI model, called Qwen 2.5-Max.

According to Alibaba Cloud, Qwen 2.5-Max outperforms DeepSeek V3 and Meta's Llama 3.1 across 11 benchmarks. The company said that it was "filled with confidence in the next version of Qwen 2.5-Max".

Some experts said that the fact that Alibaba Cloud chose to release Qwen 2.5-Max simply as services in China closed for the vacations reflected the pressure that DeepSeek has actually positioned on the domestic market. But Sheehan said it may also have been an effort to ride on the wave of promotion for Chinese designs produced by DeepSeek's surprise.

Zhipu

Zhipu is a Beijing-based start-up that is backed by Alibaba. Known as one of China's "AI tigers", it remained in the headings recently not for its AI accomplishments but for the fact that it was blacklisted by the US government. On 15 January, Zhipu was among more than two lots Chinese entities contributed to a United States restricted trade list. Zhipu in specific was added for supposedly aiding China's military advancement with its AI advancement. Zhipu condemned the decision and collegetalks.site said it lacked a factual basis.

Claims about military uplift aside, it is clear that Zhipu's progress in the AI space is fast. Its newest product is AutoGLM, an AI assistant app released in October, which assists users to operate their smart devices with intricate voice commands.

Moonshot AI

On the very same day that DeepSeek released its R1 design, 20 January, another Chinese start-up launched an LLM that it claimed might also challenge OpenAI's o1 on mathematics and reasoning.

Moonshot AI is another Alibaba-backed AI start-up, based in Beijing and valued at $3.3 bn. Unlike Alibaba, a behemoth that was founded in 1999, Moonshot AI is a relative newcomer. Like DeepSeek, it was founded in 2023.

Its offering, Kimi k1.5, is the updated version of Kimi, which was introduced in October 2023. It attracted attention for being the first AI assistant that could process 200,000 Chinese characters in a single timely. Moonshot AI later on said Kimi's ability had actually been updated to be able to manage 2m Chinese characters.

Moonshot AI "remains in the leading echelons of Chinese start-ups", Sheehan said. "It would not surprise me at all if Moonshot or Zhipu has a model that equates to or comes close to DeepSeek in efficiency within the next weeks or months."

ByteDance

Another lunar new year release originated from ByteDance, TikTok's moms and dad business. On 29 January it revealed Doubao-1.5-professional, an upgrade to its flagship AI model, which it said could exceed OpenAI's o1 in certain tests.

In addition to efficiency, Chinese business are challenging their US rivals on cost. Doubao's most powerful variation is priced at 9 yuan per million tokens, which is almost half the price of DeepSeek's offering for DeepSeek-R1. For contrast, OpenAI's o1 costs the equivalent of 438 yuan for the exact same use.

Tencent

Mainly known for gaming and WeChat, the ubiquitous messaging app, Tencent has also made strides in AI. Its flagship model is a text-to-video generator called Hunyuan, which Tencent said can perform as well as Meta's Llama 3.1.