Dazzling Chinese AI debuts mask growing pains

This month, two leading players in China's artificial intelligence industry, Zhipu AI and MiniMax, made dazzling debuts on the Hong Kong stock exchange. The pair are part of a wave of rapidly growing Chinese "AI tigers" spurred by another startup, DeepSeek, whose low-cost AI model, on par with US rivals, stunned the world a year ago. But Zhipu AI's co-founder Tang Jie warned later that despite the achievements of Chinese companies in large open-source AI models, the gap with the United States "may actually be widening".