Khaberni - An advisory body to the US Congress reported on Monday that the dominance of open-source Chinese artificial intelligence creates a "self-enhancing competitive advantage," allowing it to challenge American competitors despite limited access to advanced AI chips.
Thanks to their low cost, large Chinese language models from companies like Alibaba, Moonshot, and Minimax dominate global usage ratings on platforms like "Hugging Face" and "Open Router".
The report noted that Beijing's efforts to deploy AI across wide sectors to modernize its manufacturing base, factories, logistics networks, and robots produce real-world data that contributes to improving models, according to "Reuters".
The US-China Economic and Security Review Commission wrote in a report published on Monday: "This open ecosystem enables China to innovate close to the latest frontiers despite significant constraints in computing power."
The report added: "Chinese labs have narrowed performance gaps with the best Western large language models."
Since 2022, US lawmakers have imposed successive rounds of export restrictions on China, preventing it from obtaining the most advanced AI chips, although Washington allowed the export of Nvidia's second-most advanced chips in December.
In the meantime, American companies, including "OpenAI" which developed "ChatGPT", and "Anthropic" which developed "Claude", as well as traditional tech giants, have invested billions of dollars to stay at the forefront of this new technology.
But their position may be threatened.
The report mentioned that "the proliferation of open-source models creates alternative pathways for leadership in AI."
Some estimates indicate that about 80% of emerging American AI companies are now using Chinese open-source AI models.
The leading "R1" model from the emerging Chinese company DeepSea, launched last year, quickly surpassed "ChatGPT" to become the most downloaded model on the "App Store" in the United States.
According to "Hugging Face", Alibaba's "Queen" family of models has overtaken Meta's "Llama" model in total global cumulative downloads.
With AI boundaries moving from large language models to holistic AI and embodied AI, China may be better positioned to leverage its massive data collection efforts to enhance the development of humanoid robots and self-driving software, or even dual-purpose technologies, according to the committee report.
