China’s AI Surge: Lunar New Year, Global Disruption, and the R1 Ripple Effect

Is the West still leading the AI race, or has China quietly rewritten the rules while the rest of us were unwrapping holiday gifts?

China’s AI industry is flexing its muscles, with a pre-Lunar New Year flurry of groundbreaking model releases. DeepSeek has become the poster child of this momentum, disrupting global norms by achieving parity with US giants like OpenAI on a fraction of the resources.

Its just released new Janus-Pro text-to-image model is taking aim at Dall-E 3 and Stability AI, while its R1 reasoning model has inspired confidence in China’s AI ecosystem.

Meanwhile, other players aren’t sitting idle:

• Alibaba’s Qwen 2.5-1M tackles longer input processing for memory-heavy AI agents.
• Zhipu’s GLM-PC is focused on enterprise automation with government backing.
• Moonshot’s Kimi k1.5 integrates text and image reasoning with long-form processing.

Chinese firms are building not just models, but momentum and they are poised to redefine the AI race entirely.With China’s AI sector setting the pace, how can other nations compete without resorting to brute force? Can innovation outweigh sheer compute power?

Read the full article on Financial Times.

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💡 We're entering a world where intelligence is synthetic, reality is augmented, and the rules are being rewritten in front of our eyes.

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