Is China quietly winning the AI race?

Each month, lots of of tens of millions of customers flock to Pinterest in search of the most recent types.

One paged titled “the most ridiculous things” is crammed with loads of wacky concepts to encourage creatives. Crocs repurposed as flower pots. Cheeseburger-shaped eyeshadow. A gingerbread home manufactured from greens.

However what would-be consumers could not know is the tech behind this is not essentially US-made. Pinterest is experimenting with Chinese language AI fashions to hone its advice engine.

“We have successfully made Pinterest an AI-powered buying assistant,” the agency’s boss Invoice Prepared advised me.

In fact, the San Francisco-based tastemaker may use any variety of American AI labs to energy issues behind-the-scenes.

However for the reason that launch of China’s DeepSeek R-1 mannequin in January 2025, Chinese language AI tech has more and more been part of Pinterest.

Prepared calls the so-called “DeepSeek second” a breakthrough.

“They selected to open supply it, and that sparked a wave of open supply fashions,” he mentioned.

Chinese language opponents embrace Alibaba’s Qwen and Moonshot’s Kimi, whereas TikTok proprietor ByteDance can be engaged on comparable expertise.

Pinterest Chief Expertise Officer Matt Madrigal mentioned the power of those fashions is that they are often freely downloaded and customised by corporations like his – which isn’t the case with the vast majority of fashions supplied by US rivals like OpenAI, which makes ChatGPT.

“Open supply strategies that we use to coach our personal in-house fashions are 30% extra correct than the main off-the-shelf fashions,” Madrigal mentioned.

And people improved suggestions come at a a lot decrease price, he mentioned, typically ninety p.c lower than utilizing the proprietary fashions favoured by US AI builders.

Pinterest is hardly the one US enterprise relying on AI tech from China.

These fashions are gaining traction throughout an array of Fortune 500 corporations.

Airbnb boss Brian Chesky advised Bloomberg in October his firm relied “quite a bit” on Alibaba’s Qwen to energy its AI customer support agent.

He gave three easy causes – it is “superb”, “quick” and “low-cost”.

Additional proof could be discovered on Hugging Face, the place individuals go to obtain ready-made AI fashions – together with from main builders Meta and Alibaba.

Jeff Boudier, who builds merchandise on the platform, mentioned it’s the price issue that leads younger start-ups to take a look at Chinese language fashions over their US counterparts.

“For those who have a look at the highest trending fashions on Hugging Face – those which can be most downloaded and appreciated by the neighborhood – sometimes, Chinese language fashions from Chinese language labs occupy lots of the high 10 spots,” he advised me.

“There are weeks the place 4 out of 5 high coaching fashions on Hugging Face are from Chinese language labs.”

In September, Qwen topped Meta’s Llama to change into probably the most downloaded household of enormous language fashions on the Hugging Face platform.

Meta released its open-source Llama AI fashions in 2023. Up till the discharge of DeepSeek and Alibaba’s fashions, they have been thought of the go-to selection for builders engaged on bespoke functions.

However the launch of Llama 4 final yr left builders underwhelmed, and Meta has reportedly been utilizing open-source fashions with Alibaba, Google, and OpenAI to coach a brand new mannequin set for launch this spring.

Airbnb additionally makes use of a number of fashions, together with US-based ones, internet hosting them securely within the firm’s personal infrastructure. The info isn’t offered to the builders of the AI fashions they use, based on the corporate.

Going into 2025, the consensus was regardless of billions of {dollars} being spent by US tech corporations, Chinese language corporations have been threatening to drag forward.

“That is not the story anymore,” Boudier mentioned. “Now, the perfect mannequin is an open-source mannequin.”

A report printed final month by Stanford College discovered Chinese language AI fashions “appear to have caught up and even pulled forward” of their world counterparts – each when it comes to what they’re able to, and the way many individuals are utilizing them.

In a current interview with the BBC, former UK deputy prime minister Sir Nick Clegg mentioned he felt US corporations have been overly centered on the pursuit of AI which can sooner or later surpass human intelligence.

Final yr, Sir Nick left his submit as head of worldwide affairs at Meta, the developer of Llama. Boss Mark Zuckerberg has dedicated billions of {dollars} to attaining what he calls “superintelligence.”

Some consultants are actually calling these ambitions imprecise and ill-defined – giving China a gap to dominate the open-source AI area.

“Here is the irony,” Sir Nick mentioned. Within the battle between “the world’s nice autocracy” and “the world’s best democracy” – China and America – China is “doing extra to democratise the expertise they’re competing over”.

The Stanford report additionally prompt China’s success in growing open-source fashions could possibly be partly defined by authorities help.

On the opposite aspect of the world, US corporations like OpenAI are underneath intense strain to extend income and change into worthwhile – and is now turning to ads to assist get there.

The corporate launched two open-source fashions final summer time – its first in years. However it has poured most of its sources into proprietary fashions to assist it generate profits.

OpenAI boss Sam Altman advised me in October it has invested aggressively into securing ever extra computing energy and infrastructure offers with companions.

“Income will develop tremendous quick, however it’s best to anticipate us to speculate a ton in coaching, within the subsequent mannequin and the subsequent and the subsequent and the subsequent,” he mentioned.