The rapid advancement of China’s AI is threatening to shake up the market currently dominated by the United States. TS Lombard’s chief China economist and head of Asia research Rory Green told CNBC’s “Squawk Box Europe” America’s “perceived monopoly” on tech and artificial intelligence is broken and China broke it.
“I think the China tech shock is just getting started. It’s not just AI, DeepSeek, and electric vehicles. China is moving up the value chain very rapidly … It’s the first time in history that an emerging market economy is at the forefront of science and technology,” Green stated during a conversation with CNBC’s Ben Boulos and Steve Sedgewick.
He continued by saying China tech is rapidly advancing due to its “pairing of dominant-market level technology with emerging-market production costs backed by its massive supply chain.” This is all made complete with the backing of Xi Jinping financially.
China AI+ Initiative
Last year, Beijing launched a 60.06 billion yuan ($8.69 billion) national AI fund. The initiative was called “AI+” and is integrated across China’s economy, society, and industries.
China is developing highly advanced artificial intelligence models powered by Huawei chip clusters and abundant low-cost energy in efforts to compete with the U.S. in the AI arms race.
Currently, U.S. chip giant Nvidia holds the gold standard for semiconductors used to train artificial intelligence models, however, Huawei is closing that gap by “deploying larger volumes of chips and leveraging cheaper power to scale compute,” reports CNBC.
Green says China could easily create its own “tech sphere” with its low-cost tech offerings as the second-largest economy in the world. Lower cost technology is attractive to developing countries. “China is a top trade partner for most of the world, particularly in emerging and frontier economies. What happens if that repeats on tech?” Green stated.
Developing countries that do not have national security issues with China have more options. They can choose between “low-cost China tech, Huawei, 5G batteries, solar panels, AI, probably some cheap RMB financing,” or “high-cost American and European alternative. For these economies, I think the choice is fairly simple, and you could see easily a world where maybe most of the world’s population is running on a Chinese tech stack in five to 10 years time,” Green added.
CEO of Google DeepMind Demis Hassabis told CNBC in January, China’s artificial intelligence models could be just “a matter of months” behind the U.S. and are closer to those capabilities than they were a couple years ago.
AI Growth & Development
Three years ago, artificial intelligence was drawing human hands with six fingers, but by 2024, it was explaining graduate-level science, according to The Launch Key.
Over the last six weeks, 143,000 users have starred the Github files for OpenClaw, creating personal agents that allows users to multiply their output one hundred times, and three days ago, founder of OpenClaw Peter Steinberger was hired by OpenAI, as reported by The Launch Key.
The Launch Key asserts that with the procurement of Steinberger, ChatGPT “just grabbed the hottest open source tool and gave it way more resources than they could have imagined and that will make it easier for normal people to use.”
Pod caster Marc Andreessen with “a16z Show” believes everyone should use artificial intelligence by testing it on real world tasks such as a messy spreadsheet, a complex legal contract, a logical work flow, or build a financial model. He reminds new users the first answers will not be perfect. Rephrase the questions for better results over time. Even as the tools change, the people with experience will have more opportunities.
Mark Cuban thinks AI job creation is the hottest thing since the internet. Business savvy people who know how to set up agents are going to be in high demand, but as more people become experts, that window will close.
China AI Launches
China is bringing in the Lunar New Year with a variety of artificial intelligence model launches. Alibaba, Zhipu, and ByteDance have all announced new product launches leading up to the country’s biggest holiday. These deployments are in preparation of the Chinese market for AI agents that are able to make decisions and execute tasks without the need of human assistance, according to Euronews.
Alibaba released Qwen3.5 hours before the Feb. 16 start of the Lunar New Year. According to the company, the new model understands text, images, and videos across 200 languages.
It is able to deploy artificial intelligence agents five times faster than competitors including ChatGPT and Claude with the ability to fill out forms, complete multi-step workflows and navigate websites, according to Alibaba.
Qwen3.5 has he ability to “generate functional 3D games, browsers, websites, and can analyze medical imagery,” according to the company. The new launch also costs 60 percent less than the predecessor model, Qwen2.5.
The Chinese company behind TikTok, ByteDance launched Doubao 2.0 over the weekend. The AI chatbot computes complex reasoning and multi-step execution that matches ChatGPT and Gemini’s current models, according to Euronews.
The company also released SeeDance 2.0 on Feb. 14. This is the second version of the image-to-video and text-to-video app allowing users access to director-level controls for the creation of immersive audio and video creation. One viral video using this app features a rooftop fight between Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise.
The American Motion Picture Association criticized the app for launching “copyrighted works on a massive scale.” “By launching a service that operates without meaningful safeguards against infringement, ByteDance is disregarding well-established copyright law that protects the rights of creators and underpins millions of American jobs,” the statement reads.
Representatives for ByteDance told the BBC it will take the steps necessary to strengthen current safeguards on the platform to protect intellectual copyright.
On Feb. 11, Zhipu released GLM-5 an open source model engineered for “agentic intelligence, advanced multi-step reasoning, and frontier-level performance in coding, creative writing, and problem-solving,” according to the company.
Assistants built with this model have the ability to plan, browse, call tools and manage long sessions of multi-step workflows. Additionally, it has the ability to generate full-length reports as well as process and reason long academic papers.
The GLM-5 model uses the DSA attention mechanism from DeepSeek to cut computational costs. The company asserts the model was trained on Huawei Ascend chips achieving “full independence from US-manufactured semiconductor hardware,” which is a “milestone in self-reliant AI infrastructure,” according to the company.
Last month, Zhipu went public on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The stock raised HKD 4.35 billion with its next-generation model development.
Written by Jeanette Vietti
Sources:
CNBC: China’s tech stock threatens the U.S. AI monopoly and is ‘just getting started’
The Launch Key: How to win when everyone has AI
Euronews: These are China’s new AI models that have just been released ahead of the Lunar New Year
Featured Image by Benedikt von Loebell Courtesy of World Economic Forum’s Flickr Page – Creative Commons License
Discover more from Guardian Liberty Voice
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.