
China’s AI is quietly making big inroads in Silicon Valley
Al Jazeera
Chinese AI models are being adopted by US firms and winning praise from tech leaders in a challenge to Big Tech.
China’s AI models are quickly gaining traction in Silicon Valley, becoming integral to the operations of American companies and earning the praise of a growing list of tech leaders.
Their rapid ascent has highlighted the competitive edge that Chinese developers such as Alibaba, Z.ai, Moonshot, and MiniMax have been able to gain by offering so-called “open” language models at much lower costs than their rivals in the United States.
The trend has also cast a critical glare on the US’s efforts to stunt China’s tech sector with export controls on advanced chips, which have not stopped Chinese developers from approaching the capabilities of Silicon Valley’s tech giants.
Airbnb CEO Brian Chesky generated headlines in October when he revealed that the short-term rental platform had opted for Alibaba’s Qwen over OpenAI’s ChatGPT, praising the Chinese model as “fast and cheap”.
Social Capital CEO Chamath Palihapitiya revealed the same month that his company had migrated much of its work to Moonshot’s Kimi K2 as it was “way more performant” and “a ton cheaper” than models from OpenAI and Anthropic.













