China is a year behind US in AI models but the gap is ‘significant’, says expert

China remains about a year behind the US in large language models (LLMs), and may have more catching up to do after the release of OpenAI’s latest o1 model, according to experts.

When it comes to LLMs with text generation, China is about half a year to a year behind, Roey Tzezana, a fellow at Yuval Ne’eman Workshop for Science, Technology & Security at the Tel Aviv University, said in an interview with the Post on Wednesday.

While seemingly narrow, the gap is not easy to bridge with the speed that artificial intelligence (AI) is progressing, according to the researcher.

“Every year in the last two and a half years or so, there’s been a major change in AI capabilities,” he said. “So one year doesn’t sound like a lot and it’s not that bad, but it is a significant gap.”

A Chinese AI entrepreneur recently gave a similar evaluation. The gap between China and the US in online LLMs is still about one to two years, Li Dahai, co-founder and chief executive at Chinese AI start-up ModelBest, said in an interview with Tencent News that was published earlier this week.