Domestic AI race in China intensifies as citizens go gaga over new chatbot

Chinese artificial intelligence (AI) sensation DeepSeek is having its moment in the sun, and users in China cannot get enough of its chatbot.

- Lim Min Zhang

Over the eight-day Chinese New Year holiday that ended on Feb 4, ordinary people queried the start-up's high-performance, free-to-use chatbot with their birth data—known as "bazi" or eight characters—and it became a fortune teller, advising them on love, life and wealth.

Others shared their discoveries on social media about how the DeepSeek-R1 reasoning model could carry out human-like conversations, recommend gym workouts and write poetry. And there are those who used DeepSeek's various AI models to prepare for China's highly competitive civil service examinations.

"DeepSeek has the effect of 'breaking the circle'—many ordinary people can now use such an advanced AI for free, raising their confidence in using such technology," Mr Li Ruochong, 23, a master's student in AI at the Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou), told The Sunday Times.

The term "po quan", or breaking the circle, is used online to describe something that has gained mainstream popularity, beyond a smaller circle of fans or enthusiasts.

Yet, DeepSeek's chatbot is not the first Chinese generative AI model on the scene. The start-up was founded in 2023, around the same time that Chinese tech giants such as e-commerce platform Alibaba, search engine Baidu and TikTok creator ByteDance were launching their AI models—Alibaba with its open-source Qwen, Baidu with Ernie Bot and ByteDance with Doubao.

What shot DeepSeek to fame internationally and at home were its V3 large language model (LLM) and R1 reasoning model, released in the last two months, which have comparable results with the world's best such as the US' ChatGPT, but developed at a fraction of the cost, and without the most advanced chips.

Now, DeepSeek's achievement could catalyse the race in China to develop ever more powerful and useful AI models, by attracting more investment and talent into the industry.