San Francisco Frontiers - China's top AI players

Here's a look at the companies, big and small, driving China's AI ambitions:

- Legacy players -

Chinese internet giants Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent are racing to invest in AI, using existing vast user bases and cloud infrastructure to their advantage.

Search engine provider Baidu, sometimes called China's Google, has been a vocal proponent of the potential of AI in the country for over a decade.

Although it has recruited prominent AI researchers and its "Ernie" tool was one of the country's first AI chatbots, Baidu's fortunes have remained tied to its massive search and online marketing business.

Alibaba, the e-commerce behemoth behind shopping platforms like Taobao, is known for its open-source "Qwen" AI models -- popular with programmers worldwide because they can be freely customised.

The Qwen chatbot mobile app had more than 200 million monthly active users in January, according to AI ranking site AICPB.

Top gaming and social media firm Tencent, which launched an AI model in 2023 and a chatbot the following year, is seen as a cautious player.

Tencent's founder, Pony Ma, recently vowed to increase investment in AI, reportedly calling it "the only field worth investing in" in January.

- Beyond TikTok -

ByteDance, the Chinese company behind TikTok, is increasingly shifting its focus to AI as pressure on its overseas social media business intensifies.

And it is going well: Doubao, ByteDance's AI chatbot, is the most popular of its kind in China, with over 100 million daily active users.

This year, the firm's slick AI video generator, SeeDance 2.0, raised concerns over copyright and potential future job losses with its cinematic-looking clips created using just simple prompts.

- China's AI hero -

Startup DeepSeek started life in 2023 as a side project of a data-driven hedge fund, but shook up the global AI scene with its "R1" model in January 2025.

DeepSeek's low-cost, high-performance R1 chatbot challenged assumptions of US dominance in what some have called the "Sputnik moment" for AI.

Its open-source approach has galvanised the country's AI industry and accelerated the global diffusion of Chinese models.

Its newest V4 model, released Friday, promises performance similar to leading closed-source models at lower cost, according to the company.

DeepSeek-V4 features an ultra-long context of one million tokens and 1.6 trillion parameters for the Pro version -- measures that determine how much input the model can absorb and its decision-making ability.

"In world knowledge benchmarks, DeepSeek-V4-Pro significantly leads other open-source models and is only slightly outperformed by the top-tier closed-source model, (Google's) Gemini-Pro-3.1," DeepSeek said in a statement on Friday.

- Startup 'tigers' -

The startups Zhipu AI, MiniMax and Moonshot AI are nicknamed China's "AI tigers" -- challenging legacy tech giants on AI foundation model research.

Zhipu AI emerged from the prestigious Tsinghua University and was initially known for its strong focus on computing research.

The firm is a major provider of chatbot tools to Chinese businesses, and the performance of its latest "GLM-5" model impressed developer communities.

MiniMax targets the consumer market with its multimedia tools, from AI companions to video generators.

Both Zhipu and MiniMax saw their stock prices soar when they went public in Hong Kong in January, but both have also faced challenges.

A year ago, Washington put Zhipu on its export control blacklist over national security concerns, while Disney and other US entertainment outfits are suing MiniMax for copyright infringement.

Moonshot AI's Chinese name, Yue Zhi Anmian, pays tribute to Pink Floyd's album "The Dark Side of the Moon", reflecting the rock music passion of its co-founder Yang Zhilin.

Its latest offering, "Kimi K2.5", is one of the most popular AI models on developer platform OpenRouter.

Kimi K2.5's success is reflected in the company's revenues. Moonshot AI reportedly earned its 2025 full-year revenue in just weeks since its launch.

H.Davis--SFF