AFTER technological advances in the artificial intelligence (AI) industry marked by large language model (LLM) fever since 2022, Chinese firms in the rapidly advancing sector have cemented their position as major players and are intensifying efforts to narrow the gap with forerunners.

According to a SuperBench assessment report for LLMs by Tsinghua University, among 14 representative models in the world, models like GPT-4 and Claude-3 continue to lead in several capabilities. However, leading Chinese models such as start-up Zhipu AI’s GLM-4 and Baidu’s Ernie Bot 4.0 have shown impressive performance, approaching the top level of their foreign counterparts and gradually closing the gap.

Industry insiders say that China, with its enormous data resources and diverse application scenarios, has gradually established itself as a prominent trendsetter and a second-to-none magnet for related industries amid the trend of exploring new frontiers of AI.

Of the 1,328 AI LLMs globally, 36 percent are from China, the second-largest proportion after the United States, according to a white paper on the global digital economy released by the China Academy of Information and Communications Technology at the Global Digital Economy Conference 2024, which runs from Tuesday to Friday in Beijing.

From China tech giant Baidu’s Ernie to TikTok owner ByteDance’s Doubao, Chinese tech firms have commercially launched a batch of LLMs and are leveraging extensive data to revolutionize AI applications across various platforms.

In May alone, Alibaba Cloud officially released Tongyi Qianwen 2.5 at the start of the month, comparable to GPT-4 Turbo in overall performance, and less than a week later, ByteDance introduced the Doubao family of models, featuring multimodal models.

Xue Lan, dean of Schwarzman College at Tsinghua University, attributes the success of China’s AI sector to widespread societal acceptance of AI, a robust business-led ecosystem, and supportive government policies.

Speaking of China’s advantages and how they benefit other countries, Kang Xi, an assistant professor at Vanderbilt University in the United States, underscores China’s computing power and vast consumer data, which are refining the foundations of AI models and facilitating the creation of tailored models adaptable for other countries’ implementation.

These advantages finally fostered an energetic generative AI landscape in China. A growing number of companies, including start-ups, tech giants and State-owned enterprises, are rushing to adopt generative AI tools to enhance their productivity and efficiency.

Meanwhile, nearly 30,000 AI companies are operating worldwide as of the first quarter of this year, with approximately 34 percent based in the United States and around 15 percent in China, according to the white paper.