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China’s AI frenzy: DeepSeek is already everywhere — cars, phones, even hospitals
The Chinese EV industry will benefit as DeepSeek elevates the consumer experience of its products, making its cars even more attractive globally. China is already competitive in the EV manufacturing chain, including the production of lithium batteries and robotics, Grace Shao, founder of AI-industry newsletter AI Proem, told Rest of World.
“Chinese EV market leaders have all their ducks in a row, and now DeepSeek is accessible to them, perfectly positioning them to excel as the various components come together along the supply chain,” Shao said.
South China Morning Post
Open-source models and fresh funding: China’s AI start-ups scramble to respond to DeepSeek
“Before DeepSeek’s R1, many [Chinese AI start-ups] were starting to pivot and focus on consumer-facing applications, driven by the same monetisation strategy in the mobile internet era,” said AI analyst Grace Shao, founder of industry newsletter AI Proem. “Meanwhile, in the US, AI has been largely diffused as a way to empower enterprises and white-collar productivity.”
Shao pointed out that the divergent approaches are caused by structural economic differences between the US and China markets. She added that strong model capabilities remain the foundation of the AI industry.
As such, other Chinese AI model developers are now moving to narrow the gap with DeepSeek in terms of achieving major AI breakthroughs.
Fortune Magazine
How DeepSeek erased Silicon Valley’s AI lead and wiped $1 trillion from U.S. markets
China’s AI sector, meanwhile, had been hatching waves of new startups. First were the“little dragons,” machine learning and computer vision companies like SenseTime andMegvii that attracted global attention. When energy shifted to generative AI, attentionmoved to the “AI tigers”—Baichuan, Moonshot, MiniMax, and Zhipu. Now, they’ve beenovershadowed by the newest set of “dragons”: six Hangzhou-based startups, includingDeepSeek.
Hangzhou, the home of Alibaba, is the hotbed of China’s AI innovation. “It has the strengthof being far away from Beijing to avoid all kinds of bureaucratic procedures; the benefit ofbeing so close to Shanghai to access international capital and talent; and an extremelystrong talent pool thanks to Alibaba, NetEase, and others,” explains Grace Shao, founder of Proem, an AI consultancy.