Catenaa, Sunday, January 11, 2026- China can narrow its technological gap with the US, driven by growing risk-taking and innovation, although the lack of advanced chipmaking tools is hindering the sector.
China’s leading artificial intelligence researcher, Yao Shunyu, a former senior researcher at ChatGPT maker OpenAI who was named technology giant Tencent’s chief AI scientist in December, said there was a high likelihood of a Chinese firm becoming the world’s leading AI company in the next three to five years, but said the lack of advanced chipmaking machines was the main technical hurdle.
China’s so-called ‘AI tiger’ startups MiniMax and Zhipu AI had strong debuts on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange this week, reflecting growing confidence in the sector as Beijing fast-tracks AI and chip listings to bolster domestic alternatives to advanced US technology.
“Currently, we have a significant advantage in electricity and infrastructure. The main bottlenecks are production capacity, including lithography machines, and the software ecosystem,” Yao said at an AI conference in Beijing.
China has completed a working prototype of an extreme-ultraviolet lithography machine potentially capable of producing cutting-edge semiconductor chips that rival the West’s, Reuters reported last month.
Justin Lin, head of Alibaba Group Holding Qwen series of open-source models, put at less than 20% the chances of any Chinese company leapfrogging the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic with fundamental breakthroughs over the next three to five years.
His caution was shared by peers at Tencent Holdings, and at Zhipu AI, which this week helped lead Chinese large-language model makers in tapping the public market.
The breakout success of DeepSeek’s R1 model at the start of 2025 spurred a wave of Chinese firms, from giant Alibaba to startups like Zhipu, to open-source their latest AI iterations.
Such models have rapidly closed the gap with US proprietary offerings from companies like OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google.
