Chinese AI university tops Harvard, MIT in patent race

PRESIDENT XI JINPING AMONG TSINGHUA GRADUATES

- SARITHA RAI

ON A CRISP afternoon in Beijing, the campus of Tsinghua University hums with the activity of the country’s top students in science and engineering.

Badminton courts near the school’s east entrance echo with grunts and shouts. In a sleek new wing housing the Laboratory of Brain and Intelligence, the work is quieter but no less determined. Researchers, amid whiteboards dense with equations and the acrid smell of fresh paint, try to decode the inner workings of the human mind.

Tsinghua is buzzing these days. While the school has long been the nation’s leading institution for science and technology — Stanford University, Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Carnegie Mellon rolled into one, as some describe it — this has been a breakthrough year for China. The success of DeepSeek, the artificial intelligence startup that stunned the tech industry with its innovative large language model, has brought a newfound confidence to these young brainiacs that they have an opportunity to compete with — or beat — the world 's best. The school’s graduates have founded at least four of the country’s top Al startups, so far.

“DeepSeek showed that a Chinese team could lead in the LLM race,” says Yuyang Zhang, a 26-year-old who is working on a PhD in computational biology at Tsinghua.