Top Chinese AI Startups to Watch

Hello everyone,

Lately I’ve been thinking more about the pace of Generative AI improvementsinnovations, applications and new models.

In 2024, as Western generative AI startups get bought or rotating (consolidation) and while the Western media of course glorification of individualsThere is another side to this frenetic pace of innovation and research that is too often neglected. In a nutshell, it is China. China’s LLM ecosystem is just getting started, while in Silicon Valley the early stage consolidation is already pruning startups fast! It’s speed that kills. 💨

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What I notice in 2024 is how fast Chinese AI startups and their BigTech BAT (Baidu, Alibaba, Tencent) investments are making significant progress, which we rarely hear about. But who are they? What do we know about them? Google or Reddit are not the right places to find this kind of information.

I asked

by Recode China AI to look at China’s Top Generative AI Startups for us. The Chinese AI community on Substack is only just starting to slowly take off now, in mid-2024.

Visit Tony Peng’s newsletter: Recode China AI 💡 for more insights into China’s emerging AI ecosystem.

• Over the past few days, Alibaba Cloud issued Qwen2-VLwhich is designed to understand videos longer than 20 minutes, among other things, see the Github. Follow Qwen on X here.

Blogging: https://qwenlm.github.io/blog/qwen2-vl/

GitHub: https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen2-VL

HF: https://huggingface.co/collections/Qwen/qwen2-vl-66cee7455501d7126940800d

ModelScope: https://modelscope.cn/organization/qwen

• China is particularly strong in AI for text-to-video. Zhipu has also released a video call real-time chabot feature. The new feature is called Qingyanallows users to have real-time video interactions with the AI. GLM-4 Plus by Zhipu has advanced capabilities in language understanding, image and video understanding, and multimodal processing. It includes several submodels such as GLM-4V-Plus for video understanding and CogView-3-Plus for image generation.

• MiniMax on their part also recently released a text-to-video broadcast product. MiniMax-video-01 produces videos in HD with a resolution of 1280×720 pixels at 25 frames per second.

I think that by the end of 2020s, China will be leading in many areas of text-to-video, text-to-action related to video, and visual reasoning. Therefore, I also expect them to win bleeding edge races in text-to-gaming and some aspects of text-to-action and Agentic AI in the future. That said, not everyone is as optimistic about Chinese AI startups as I am, given the withdrawal of foreign investment and increased difficulty for them to access AI data centers. On the contrary, I think these externally imposed bottlenecks are forcing them to innovate.

According to market research firm International Data Corporation (commonly referred to as IDC), Chinese giants in the field of artificial intelligence (AI) Baidu and SenseTime (not so long ago a startup itself) is, together with startup Zhipu AI, the largest provider of business LLM (Large Language Model) services.

1. Baidu – 19.9% ​​market share

2. SenseTime – 16% market share

3. Zhipu AI

4. Baichuan

5. 4Paradigm

When conducting research we must always take into account the Beijing Academy of AI (BAAI) and the prolific AI app builder for consumers ByteDanceWhile OpenAI is working with Broadcom to design an AI chip, that’s how they are. ByteDance was common in a16z’s (August 21) latest Consumer AI update, and for good reason. ByteDance has no less than six apps related to Generative AI in the top charts. No one is as prolific and able to scale consumer AI apps as TikTok maker ByteDance. Bytedance started an R&D project division, Currentfocused on generative AI applications by the end of 2023, and has new AI Applications in the US (and abroad) under other company names since early 2024.

In mainland China, I noticed that Baidu now serves half of China’s state-owned enterprises for “AI innovation.” The company’s enterprise-focused platform, based on Ernie LLM Qianfan now serves 150,000 customers and has helped them develop 55 original applications, according to their PR. ERNIE actually stands for Enhanced Representation through Knowledge Integration (paper) and many in the West have never heard of it. But Baidu claimed in April 2024 that it has 200 million active users, the same number as ChatGPT’s 200 million weekly active users in August.

I follow several generative AI startups from China. These are the ones I consider the real “AI tigers” 🐯 of this new generation of companies.

• Zhipu AI

• MiniMax

• Moonshot AI

• Baichuan AI

• 01.AI

(SCMP was wrong, there are not 4 but 5 and maybe even more).

China is a more dynamic market where it’s not just a few startups like Anthropic, a splinter group within OpenAI (a sort of ‘OpenAI Mafia‘), which receives all the funding. In China, the interaction between the Chinese government, BAT companies, Chinese local investors and the “war of a hundred models” the picture is much more interesting with more potential winners, dynamism and effort to innovate. In China it is not only monopoly Cloud giants disrupt the playing fieldI believe that monopoly capitalism and the huge financing rounds in the West actually hinder real innovation. Time will tell if my suspicion is correct.

In my humble opinion, China is destined to become a notable innovator in LLMs and possibly a world leader in Generative AI applications. But I don’t speak Mandarin and despite living in Taiwan, I can’t claim a front row seat at all.

1. 🤖China’s Humanoid RobotsFormer Huawei Genius Needle Threading Robot and Big Tech Reap AI Rewards

2. 👨🏻‍🏫Huawei claims AI chips outperform Nvidia’s A100, Chinese AI apps break through in the USand Tesla FSD intensifies China’s ADAS competition

3. 📽️ Zhipu AI’s ‘Hair’ Chatbot, Alibaba’s Multimodal Model Releaseand the new AI venture from miHoYo founder

• In this article, Baidu’s Global Head of Communications, Tony Peng expertly analyzes China’s generative AI “tigers” and also names three other startups to watch, for a total of eight startup profiles. Tony was a longtime senior tech reporter at Synchronizeda technical publication on AI that I have been reading for years and which has been around for ten years now.

I think few reporters in the West are qualified to talk about these startups. I will do my best to follow China’s incredible AI startup ecosystem and their innovations.