DeepSeek has rattled the AI industry. Here's a quick look at other Chinese AI models

HONG KONG (AP) — The Chinese artificial intelligence firm DeepSeek has rattled markets with claims that its latest AI model, R1, performs on a par with those of OpenAI, despite using less advanced computer chips and consuming less energy.

DeepSeek’s emergence has raised concerns that China may have overtaken the U.S. in the artificial intelligence race despite restrictions on its access to the most advanced chips. It's just one of many Chinese companies working on AI to make China the world leader in the field by 2030 and best the U.S. in the battle for technological supremacy.

Like the U.S., China is investing billions into artificial intelligence. Last week, it created a 60 billion yuan ($8.2 billion) AI investment fund, days after the U.S. imposed fresh chip export restrictions.

Beijing has also invested heavily in the semiconductor industry to build its capacity to make advanced computer chips, working to overcome limits on its access to those of industry leaders. Companies are offering talent programs and subsidies, and there are plans to open AI academies and introduce AI education into primary and secondary school curriculums.

China has established regulations governing AI, addressing safety, privacy and ethics. Its ruling Communist Party also controls the kinds of topics the AI models can tackle: DeepSeek shapes its responses to fit those limits.

Here's an overview of some other leading AI models in China:

Alibaba Cloud’s Qwen-2.5-1M is the e-commerce giant's open-source AI series. It contains large language models that can easily handle extremely long questions, and engage in longer and deeper conversations. Its ability to understand complex tasks such as reasoning, dialogues and comprehending code is improving.

Like its rivals, Alibaba Cloud has a chatbot released for public use called Qwen — also known as Tongyi Qianwen in China. Alibaba Cloud’s suite of AI models, such as the Qwen2.5 series, has mostly been deployed for developers and business customers, such as automakers, banks, video game creators and retailers, as part of product development and shaping customer experiences.

Ernie Bot, developed by Baidu, China’s dominant search engine, was the first AI chatbot made publicly available in China. Baidu said it released the model publicly to collect massive real-world human feedback to build its capacity.

Ernie Bot has 340 million users as of November 2024. Similar to OpenAI's ChatGPT, users of Ernie Bot can ask it questions and have it generate images based on text prompts. Ernie Bot is based on its Ernie 4.0 large language model.

Baidu claimed that Ernie 4.0 rivaled ChatGPT-4 during its release in Oct. 2023.

Doubao 1.5 Pro is an AI model released by TikTok's parent company ByteDance last week. Doubao is currently one of the most popular AI chatbots in China, with 60 million monthly active users.

ByteDance says the Doubao 1.5 Pro is better than ChatGPT-4o at retaining knowledge, coding, reasoning, and Chinese language processing. According to ByteDance, the model is also cost-efficient and requires lower hardware costs compared to other large language models because Doubao uses a highly optimized architecture that balances performance with reduced computational demands.

Moonshot AI is a Beijing-based startup valued at over $3 billion after its latest fundraising round. It says its recently released Kimi k1.5 matches or outperforms the OpenAI o1 model, which is designed to spend more time thinking before it responds and can solve harder and more complex problems. Moonshot claims that Kimi outperforms OpenAI o1 in mathematics, coding, and the ability to comprehend both text and visual inputs such as photos and video.

FILE - Women wearing masks to pass by the headquarters of ByteDance, owners of TikTok, in Beijing, China, Aug. 7, 2020. (AP Photo/Ng Han Guan, File)

FILE - The Alibaba logo is seen at the Vivatech show in Paris in Paris, France, Wednesday, June 14, 2023. (AP Photo/Thibault Camus, File)

FILE - Baidu chairman and CEO Robin Li speaks during the 2018 Baidu World conference in Beijing, Thursday, Nov. 1, 2018. (AP Photo/Mark Schiefelbein, File)

The smartphone apps DeepSeek page is seen on a smartphone screen in Beijing, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

An AI robot moves past an office information board showing the DeepSeek smartphone apps company in Beijing, Tuesday, Jan. 28, 2025. (AP Photo/Andy Wong)

The logo for the app DeepSeek is seen on an iPhone Monday, Jan. 27, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jon Elswick)

DUBAI, United Arab Emirates (AP) — Ayatollah Ali Khamenei dramatically remolded Iran during more than three decades as supreme leader, turning it into a regional powerhouse and bringing it increasingly into confrontation with Israel and the United States.

His dayslong funeral begins Saturday, months after being killed at the start of the U.S.-Israeli war in Iran.

Khamenei took the reins after the death in 1989 of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini, the fiery ideologue who led the overthrow of the shah and installed rule by Shiite Muslim clerics. It fell to Khamenei, a stodgier figure with weaker religious credentials, to turn that revolutionary vision into a state establishment.

He supported myriad armed groups in the Middle East, pushed ahead with Iran’s nuclear program, and faced down several protest movements with crackdowns. While his clashes with the U.S. and Israel were a source of support at home, they ultimately led to his demise.

After the 1980s war with Iraq, Khamenei turned the paramilitary Revolutionary Guard into the most important body underpinning his rule. The Guard became a military and business behemoth, the country’s most elite force, with hands across Iran’s economic sectors.

Under Khamenei’s reign, Iran also shifted fully from conventional warfare to support for proxies, building the “Axis of Resistance.”

That included backing the Lebanese militant group Hezbollah, which drove Israel from southern Lebanon in 2000 and has battled Israeli forces repeatedly since.

Iran has also supported Yemen’s Houthi rebels, who in 2014 seized the country’s capital and held on for over a decade in a stalemated war, and the Palestinian militant group Hamas, which has fought Israel in the Gaza Strip. Iranian-backed militias also waged an insurgency against U.S. forces in Iraq.

The Mideast wars sparked by Hamas’ Oct. 7, 2023, attack on Israel, however, set in motion the collapse of that “Axis of Resistance," and left Hamas and Hezbollah weaker.

For decades, Khamenei shrugged off U.N. sanctions and pushed ahead with Iran’s nuclear program, which the U.S. and its allies say hid a secret project to build a nuclear weapon up until 2003.

Khamenei issued a verbal fatwa, or religious ruling, that nuclear weapons are un-Islamic, but vowed the country would never give up its right to develop what he called a peaceful nuclear energy program.

Under a 2015 nuclear deal, Iran agreed to drastically reduce its stockpile and enrichment of uranium in exchange for the lifting of sanctions. But since U.S. President Donald Trump withdrew Washington from the accord in 2018, a move welcomed by Israel, Iran has accumulated a stockpile of uranium enriched to nearly weapons-grade levels. Israel and some U.S. officials have expressed concern that Tehran could us that to pursue nuclear arms if it chose.

Both the U.S.-Israeli bombing in 2025 and the current war have targeted Iran's nuclear program.

Political repression and Iran's faltering economy have fueled successively bigger waves of protests.

In 2009, protests broke out when the reformist opposition claimed the reelection victory of hard-line President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was rigged. Dozens were killed and hundreds arrested in a crackdown.

Economic protests broke out in 2017 and demonstrations escalated in 2019 over a rise in government-set gasoline prices. A crackdown killed over 300 people, according to activists.

Protests erupted again in 2022 over the death of Mahsa Amini, a young woman detained for not wearing her headscarf properly. More than 500 people were killed and tens of thousands arrested when security forces crushed the demonstrations.

In late 2025, economic protests erupted and grew into what appeared to be the biggest protest movement ever. Hundreds of thousands across the country took to the streets, demanding an end to the Islamic Republic. The ferocity of the crackdown — activists say at least 7,000 have been killed — stunned Iranians.

Khamenei’s death raises questions about the future of the Islamic Republic. Khamenei’s son, Ayatollah Mojtaba Khamenei, was chosen as the next supreme leader. But he was believed to have been wounded in the strikes that killed his father and has not been seen publicly.

As Trump launched the current war, he called on Iranians to “take over your government. ” There has been no sign yet of any such uprising, however, as hard-liners have rallied nightly in the streets of Tehran.

What happens after the burial of the elder Khamenei may depend greatly on bodies like the Revolutionary Guard, which has repeatedly shown its willingness to use overwhelming force to maintain power.

FILE - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then Iran's supreme leader, speaks with the media after he voted in parliamentary runoff elections in Tehran, Iran, May 10, 2024. (AP Photo/Vahid Salemi, File)

FILE - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then Iran's supreme leader, addresses thousands gathered at Imam Square in Isfahan, Iran, Oct. 30, 2001. (AP Photo, File)

FILE - Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, then Iran's supreme leader, speaks during Friday prayers at Tehran University, July 30, 1999. (AP Photo/Kamran Jebreili)