South Korean media: The gap between China's AI and the United States is only 0.3 percentage points.

South Korean media: China has almost caught up with the United States, and the gap in AI with the United States is only 0.3 percentage points!

On April 30, the South Korean newspaper "Dong-A Ilbo" published an article stating that China, which shocked the world with its AI model "DeepSeek", is rapidly catching up with the United States in the field of AI. Although the United States still leads in the field of AI, the global AI competitive landscape is rapidly reorganizing as the performance gap between the two countries' AI models has dramatically narrowed from double digits to single digits within just one year.

According to the "AI Index 2025" report released by the Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence Institute (HAI) at Stanford University, as of the end of 2023, in major AI benchmark tests such as MMLM, MMMY, MATH, and HumanEval, the performance gap between Chinese and American models ranged from 13.5 to 31.6 percentage points, with the United States leading. However, this situation has changed rapidly over the past year, and by 2024, the performance gap between China and the United States has significantly narrowed to 0.3 to 3.7 percentage points.

This means that China has made a qualitative leap in AI technology. Despite strict U.S. regulation on semiconductors and other industries, China has still rapidly caught up through technological progress. Achieving such results using only partial hardware resources, such as launching DeepSeek R-1, raises doubts about whether U.S. semiconductor export restrictions are truly effective.

The country that has developed the most important AI models is the United States (40), maintaining its first place for the second consecutive year. In second place is China, which has developed 15, followed by France with 3.

South Korea performs strongly in terms of the number of AI patents. The report shows that as of 2023, South Korea ranks first in the world with 17.3 AI patents per 100,000 people. This is an increase from 10.26 the previous year. Far ahead of second-place Luxembourg (15.3) and third-place China (6.1). Additionally, compared to 2013, South Korea's patent growth rate increased by 1043% in 2023, becoming a leading nation driving global technological growth.

However, private investment seems to be shrinking. Last year, as global AI private investment once again turned to growth, competition in the AI industry intensified further, and South Korean private investment has declined for two consecutive years.

Private investment also presents a two-strong pattern centered around the United States and China. Last year, U.S. private AI investment reached $109 billion, ranking first globally. Compared to the previous year ($67.2 billion), it grew by approximately 62%.

The scale of China's investment, ranked second, also grew by approximately 20% compared to the previous year ($7.76 billion), reaching $9.3 billion. Next are the UK with $4.5 billion, Canada with $2.9 billion, France with $2.6 billion, and Germany with $2.3 billion.

The report analyzes that "Although the United States continues to firmly lead in model development, China has greatly narrowed the gap in performance."

Original source: https://www.toutiao.com/article/1830830271357952/

Disclaimer: The article represents the views of the author alone.