It’s Not Just DeepSeek. A Guide to the Chinese AI Companies You Need to Know.

Chinese internet giants and startups are competing with each other and U.S. rivals

By Raffaele Huang Jan. 29, 2025

When DeepSeek jolted the global tech world with its low-cost model, it also threw the spotlight on China’s booming AI market, a sector that the Chinese government has identified as a national priority.

DeepSeek is just one of an array of companies developing AI models and applications. Here’s a guide to a number of the biggest players in China.

THE TECH GIANTS

Alibaba: The e-commerce giant provides conversational chatbot service Qwen, powered by multiple AI models, including some designed for more complex reasoning and coding tasks. This week, it also released Qwen2.5-Max, an artificial-intelligence model it said was competitive with global leaders, including DeepSeek. It hasn’t clarified whether it developed the model with the low cost and high efficiency that DeepSeek has boasted of.

Tencent: China’s biggest videogame company has developed multiple versions of its AI model Hunyuan. It said one version released in November delivered performance comparable to Meta’s Llama 3.1. According to some researchers, Tencent might use around a tenth of the computing power Meta used to train the model. The company is integrating AI capabilities into its WeChat app, the ubiquitous platform in China providing everything from chats to banking.

Baidu: Baidu, which first emerged as a search-engine company, was the first in China to launch a ChatGPT equivalent, called Ernie Bot. Its technology chief said in November that its model had 430 million users.

ByteDance: The owner of TikTok has a chatbot called Doubao, which can be translated as bean bun. The app has been among the most downloaded chatbots in China, with around 60 million monthly active users, according to Aicpb.com, a website tracking AI products.

THE UPSTARTS

DeepSeek: The company surprised the global tech community earlier this month after it said it had trained AI models that delivered high performance at low cost and without the most advanced chips. Then, on Tuesday, it released a multimodal model, called Janus Pro, that it said could produce results comparable to OpenAI’s text-to-image model DALL·E 3.

StepFun: The company, valued at around $2 billion, has a model that is now ranked for performance among the top 10 in the world in Chatbot Arena. Founded by a former senior Microsoft scientist, the company counts Tencent and the Shanghai government as key investors.

Moonshot AI: Moonshot’s Kimi chatbot has around 13 million users in China, according to Aicpb.com. The startup, valued at around $3.3 billion and backed by Alibaba and Tencent, was founded by a young Chinese scientist who had stints at Meta and Google. This month, Moonshot released a multimodal reasoning model, called k1.5, that it said outperformed big names such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude3.5 Sonnet on some major benchmarks, including a math challenge.

MiniMax: MiniMax is a Shanghai-based startup valued at $3 billion. It invented a Character.ai-like companion chatbot called Talkie, which has become popular in the U.S. This month, it published two open-source models that it claimed to be comparable to OpenAI’s GPT-4o and Anthropic’s Claude3.5 Sonnet, using a technique called Lightning Attention that allows faster computation.

Zhipu: Zhipu, valued at around $3 billion in its latest fundraising round in December, has invented a chatbot, as well as a video-generating model called Ying that is similar to OpenAI’s Sora. Zhipu was also included this month in a U.S. trade blacklist for developing AI systems that could have military uses. Zhipu said the U.S. move was baseless.