01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee names DeepSeek the frontrunner in China’s AI models

Kai-Fu Lee, 01.AI’s founder and venture capitalist, predicts that China’s AI industry will consolidate around the three major AI model developers, DeepSeek (currently leading), Alibaba, and ByteDance. In the US, he believes that Elon Musk’s xAI will dominate the market, followed by OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic. Lee noted that investors in both countries have shifted their focus away from expensive foundational AI models and towards applications, consumer-facing products, and infrastructure innovations.
His Beijing startup 01.AI is among China’s six top AI model developers, alongside Zhipu AI (Baichuan), MiniMax (Moonshot AI), StepFun and Moonshot AI. In January, Lee announced that 01.AI would no longer pre-train trillion-parameter models in order to focus on smaller, faster, and commercially viable systems.[Jiemian (in Chinese)