DeepSeek, Temu, TikTok, China tech starting to pull ahead

China’s top leaders did not appear to fully grasp the power of artificial intelligence in July 2023, when one of us, Eric, and Henry Kissinger met them. Economic malaise hung in the air. But when the other of us, Selina, returned to China just 19 months later, the optimism was palpable.

Dinner conversations were dominated by DeepSeek and other AI chatbots. Electric cars whizzed by, while apps offered drone food delivery. Unitree humanoid robots danced and spun handkerchiefs onstage during the “Spring Festival Gala,” China’s most-watched TV program, making the company a household name overnight.

This is the country we’re dealing with. China is at parity or pulling ahead of the United States in a variety of technologies, notably at the A.I. frontier. And it has developed a real edge in how it disseminates, commercialises and manufactures tech. History has shown us that those who adopt and diffuse a technology the fastest wins.

So it’s no surprise that China has chosen to forcefully retaliate against America’s recent tariffs. To win the race for the future of technology, and in turn the war for global leadership, we must discard the belief that America is always ahead.

For a long time, China was slower to the game. In 2007, the year Steve Jobs unveiled Apple’s first iPhone, the internet revolution had barely begun across the Pacific: Only about 10% of China’s population was online, while the tech giant Alibaba was still seven years away from listing on the New York Stock Exchange.

The AI race appeared to follow the old pattern. The debut of ChatGPT in San Francisco in November 2022 led to a slew of copycat chatbots in China, most of which were estimated to be years behind. Yet, as with smartphones and electric vehicles, Silicon Valley failed to anticipate that China would find a way to swiftly develop a cheap yet state-of-the-art competitor. Today’s Chinese models are very close behind U.S. versions. In fact, DeepSeek’s March update to its V3 large language model is, by some benchmarks, the best non-reasoning model.

The stakes of this contest are high. Leading American companies have largely been developing proprietary AI models and charging for access, in part because their models cost hundreds of millions of dollars to train. Chinese AI firms have expanded their influence by freely distributing their models for the public to use, download and modify, which makes them more accessible to researchers and developers around the world.

Apps for the Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu and the social media platforms RedNote and TikTok are already among the most downloaded globally. Combine this with the continuing popularity of China’s free open-source AI models, and it’s not hard to imagine teenagers worldwide hooked on Chinese apps and AI companions, with autonomous Chinese-made agents organising our lives, and businesses with services and products powered by Chinese models.

In the internet revolution, Western dominance of the market helped America’s digital economy swell to $2.6 trillion by 2022. That’s bigger than Canada’s entire GDP. For the US to reap the benefits of the coming A.I. revolution, which is expected to have a larger impact than advent of the internet, the world needs to choose America’s computing stack — algorithms, apps, hardware — not China’s.

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