Before Chinese AI startup DeepSeek sent shockwaves through Silicon Valley and Wall Street earlier this year, China’s artificial intelligence industry was already buzzing with homegrown AI models seemingly on par with those developed by the West.
Major Chinese tech firms such as Tencent and Alibaba have been building their own AI models while backing AI startups to boost China’s AI advancements amid U.S. efforts to curb the country’s technological progress.
Since OpenAI launched ChatGPT in 2022, China’s tech firms have developed their own versions of the AI chatbot, which is not allowed in China. While DeepSeek’s AI chatbot has climbed to be among the most downloaded free apps in China, it is still joined by AI chatbots from its competitors, Tencent (TCEHY) and ByteDance.
Here’s a look at some of China’s top AI chatbots.
The DeepSeek AI chatbot was developed by a Chinese AI startup also called DeepSeek. The startup was founded in 2023 by Liang Wenfeng, co-founder of the Chinese quantitative hedge fund High-Flyer Capital Management.
After DeepSeek demonstrated that its V3 AI models and R1 reasoning models could perform on par with models from OpenAI, the AI chatbot surged to the top of Apple’s (AAPL) App Store downloads. The DeepSeek site, meanwhile, experienced outages from an influx of new users. The startup had to put a temporary limit on registrations after “large-scale malicious attacks.” DeepSeek was powered by V3, which the startup said was competitive with Meta’s (META) Llama 3.1 and OpenAI’s 4o models.
Unlike some of its competitors, DeepSeek explains its “reasoning” before responding to inquiries. However, it does not directly answer prompts about politically sensitive topics in China, such as President Xi Jinping or Taiwan.
Tencent’s Yuanbao AI chatbot is powered by the company’s Hunyuan AI model and DeepSeek’s R1 reasoning model. Yuanbao surpassed DeepSeek this week as the most downloaded app by iPhone users in China, according to Bloomberg.
The AI chatbot, launched last May, can be downloaded through Tencent-operated WeChat, the South China Morning Post reported. WeChat has more than one billion users, and is China’s largest social media platform.
ByteDance’s conversational AI chatbot, Doubao, outpaced rivals from Baidu (BIDU) and Alibaba (BABA) to become China’s most popular AI app in January, according to Counterpoint Research. The AI chatbot, which was released in August, had around 60 million monthly active users as of November.
The Doubao AI model is multimodal, meaning it can process text, image, and audio prompts. The AI chatbot is integrated into ByteDance’s ecosystem, which includes China’s version of TikTok, Douyin.
Moonshot, one of China’s “Six Tigers” AI frontrunners, developed the Kimi AI chatbot. It was released in 2023, and can process queries of up to two million Chinese characters. Moonshot is backed by some of China’s largest tech firms, including Alibaba.
As of November, Kimi was one of China’s top five AI chatbots, with almost 13 million monthly active users, according to Counterpoint Research.
Talkie is an AI chatbot platform with different characters, such as fictional characters or celebrities, that users can chat with. It was developed by one of China’s “Six Tigers,” MiniMax, and is available globally. However, according to the South China Morning Post, Talkie was removed from the U.S. Apple App Store in December, citing “technical reasons.”
Zhipu, another of China’s “Six Tigers,” developed the ChatGLM AI chatbot, which is among the top five most popular AI chatbots in China, according to Counterpoint Research. As of November, ChatGLM had almost 6.4 million monthly active users in China, and was mostly used for work productivity.
Chinese tech giants Alibaba and Tencent are among Zhipu’s backers. The AI startup was founded in 2019.
Ernie Bot was developed by tech giant Baidu, and is powered by the company’s Ernie AI models. The AI chatbot was first released in March 2023, and can “interact in dialogue, create content, reason with knowledge, and generate multiple modes of output,” according to Baidu. It is powered by the latest version of Baidu’s AI model, Ernie 4.0, which was released in November 2023.
In February, Baidu said that it would release the next version of the AI model, Ernie 4.5, in the next few months, and open source it on June 30.
The iFlyTek Spark AI chatbot was developed by partially state-owned iFlyTek, which released its iFlytek Spark Big Model V4.0 in June.
iFlyTek Spark is mostly used as an AI assistant. As of November, it was the fifth-most used AI chatbot in China, with almost six million monthly active users.
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