BEIJING — China has narrowed the AI development gap with the United States to just three months in some areas, because firms such as DeepSeek have worked out how to use chips and apply algorithms more efficiently, the CEO of Chinese startup 01.AI Lee Kai-fu said.
Lee, a prominent figure in the global artificial intelligence space and a former head of Google China, told Reuters that startup DeepSeek revealed that China had pulled ahead in areas such as infrastructure software engineering
DeepSeek shook the global AI industry when it launched an AI reasoning model in January that it said was trained with less advanced chips and was cheaper to develop than its Western rivals.
The announcement challenged the assumption that US sanctions were holding back China’s AI sector, Reuters reported.
“Previously I think it was a six to nine month gap and behind in everything. And now I think that’s probably three months behind in some of the core technologies, but actually ahead in some specific areas,” Lee said in an interview in Hong Kong.
“The fact that DeepSeek are able to figure out the chain of thought with a new way to do reinforcement learning is either catching up with the US, learning quickly, or maybe even more innovative now,” Lee said, referring to how DeepSeek models show users their reasoning process before delivering answers — a capability first developed by OpenAI but not released to users.
