China’s AI industry is taking on the US tech giants

Chinese start-up DeepSeek is as powerful as ChatGPT and purportedly uses much less computing power. Will this competition spur US companies to greater things?

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Copy link Copied Copy link Copied Subscribe to gift this article Gift 5 articles to anyone you choose each month when you subscribe. Already a subscriber? Login The world’s first “reasoning model”, an advanced form of artificial intelligence, was released in September by OpenAI, an American firm. o1, as it is called, uses a “chain of thought” to answer difficult questions in science and mathematics, breaking down problems to their constituent steps and testing various approaches to the task behind the scenes before presenting a conclusion to the user.

Its unveiling set off a race to copy this method. Google came up with a reasoning model called “Gemini Flash Thinking” in December. OpenAI responded with o3, an update of o1, a few days later.



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