The US enjoying it’s lead in the AI race might not be for very long. According to Demis Hassabis, CEO of Google, Deepmind the Chinese AI models are now only “a matter of months” behind their US and Western counterparts. Demis Hassabis said this during a CNBC podcast The Tech Download, which launched yesterday. Importantly his comments come against a rising concern among American AI companies about the progress and speed of Chines AI models.
Although Chinese AI models are behind the US one’s yet the belief that they are years behind their US rivals is challenged by Demis Hassabis. According to him the gap has reduced in recent years. “Maybe they’re only a matter of months behind at this point,” he said, adding that Chinese models appear much closer to the AI frontier than people assumed one or two years ago”.
Increasing debates around Chinese AI models!
China’s progress in the AI industry became especially clear last year when AI lab DeepSeek released a powerful model that surprised the global tech industry. What stood out was that the model delivered strong performance despite using less-advanced chips and costing far less to build than similar American systems. Since then, Chinese tech giants like Alibaba, along with startups such as Moonshot AI and Zhipu, have continued releasing increasingly capable AI models.
Catching Up not Leading!
According to Demis Hassabis an interesting to note is that Chinese AI models are catching up to the US ones and not leading them. While Chinese firms have shown they can get close to the cutting edge, they have not proven they can create entirely new breakthoroughs he added.
“The question is, can they innovate something new beyond the frontier?” Hassabis said. He pointed to the transformer architecture developed by Google researchers in 2017 as an example of the kind of breakthrough that reshaped modern AI. That innovation now underpins systems like OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini.
Other Tech Leaders View
Not only Demis Hassabis, other Big Tech Leaders from the Silicon Valley like Jensen Huang of Nvidia has said that the US is “not far ahead” in the AI race, noting that China remains strong in infrastructure and model development, even if the US leads in chips.
However, access to advanced semiconductors remains a major challenge for Chinese firms due to US export restrictions. While domestic chipmakers like Huawei are trying to fill the gap, their technology still lags behind Nvidia’s top offerings. Some analysts believe this could eventually widen the gap again.
