Reference News Network, October 15 report - The U.S. "Washington Post" website published an article by Kevin Schaul titled "China Is Now Leading the United States in This Key Area of the Artificial Intelligence Race" on October 13. The following is a translated version of the article:

An analysis of publicly available data by the "Washington Post" shows that although the AI boom began in the United States, Chinese companies are quietly surpassing their American counterparts in artificial intelligence technologies that are freely available and further developed by anyone.

Last year, most of the best free or open-source AI models were developed in the United States. Now, they are almost all made in China.

American companies are usually considered to provide the most powerful proprietary AI tools, such as ChatGPT from the OpenAI Research Center and the "Gemini" chatbot from Google. However, by openly sharing AI software, Chinese companies may have a significant impact on the development curve of this technology.

On the LMArena platform (a website that uses blind testing to find out which AI outputs users prefer), open models developed by Chinese companies such as Alibaba scored higher than products from American companies like OpenAI and Meta.

Eileen Sulaiman, Chief Policy Officer at Hugging Face, said that Chinese companies are often more productive than other AI developers. They "frequently launch products, and the products are very good, which is also a way to build a user base." AI developers and researchers often share models and datasets on the Hugging Face website.

In previous technological changes such as the Internet and smartphones, free open-source technologies that others could modify played a crucial role. Most of this originated from American companies, thus helping establish Silicon Valley's global dominance.

However, in January of this year, the Chinese startup DeepSeek shocked the tech world with its influential DeepSeek model. On the LMArena platform, it quickly replaced Meta's Llama model.

One way to track the influence of an open software is to observe its popularity among hackers, researchers, and entrepreneurs who are interested in new ideas. Hugging Face provides the main platform for sharing open-weight models, where developers can "like" the projects they support.

By this standard, DeepSeek from China ranked first, with a number of likes (12,800) equivalent to twice that of the top Llama model (6,300). OpenAI Research Center ranked fifth (4,000).

No single measurement is perfect, and some American models appear to perform better when measured by other standards.

However, Sulaiman from Hugging Face said that in addition to being more productive, Chinese competitors are also highly competitive in other application scenarios, having released top open-source software for generating images and videos.

For profit-seeking companies, free software may seem counterintuitive, but once a project becomes successful enough to build an ecosystem or become an industry standard, it can generate profits. For example, the majority of smartphones worldwide run on Google's Android operating system, which has helped drive more users to use the company's search, email, and other services. (Translated by Yang Xinpeng)

Original: https://www.toutiao.com/article/7561275490200371753/

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