On January 20, 2025, a Chinese company launched DeepSeek, which directly hit Nvidia's stock. For a while, the voice of China's AI rise fermented on social media, which made American AI companies that have always been far ahead, such as ChatGPT and Geminin, begin to be questioned by investors and the market. This incident was described as the "Sputnik crisis."
As more and more companies and developers began to access DeepSeek, ChatGPT, the current strongest king of AI, launched the GPT-4.5 model in February 2025, which significantly reduced the hallucination rate and improved emotional intelligence and conversation fluency.
Also in February, xAI, owned by Tesla founder Musk, officially released its latest artificial intelligence model Grok 3 on the 18th.
And what did Google and Apple, the overlords of the smart phone era, do?
Google's Gemini 2.0 Flash can be used for an unlimited time. Then, Gemini released a big move: 2.0 Flash Thinking (experimental), Deep Research, and Personalization (experimental) are all released and open for use. As of April 2, 2025, Gemini's 2.5 Pro (experimental) can also be used.
Let's take a look at what Apple has done?
Apple quickly identified a new AI partner in the Chinese market-Alibaba. At the same time, in February 2025, Apple announced that it would invest $500 billion in the United States over the next four years, including building a large AI server factory in Texas. Recently, it was revealed that Apple invested about $1 billion to purchase Nvidia GB300 NVL72 systems.
Several Chinese giants on the west coast of the Pacific Ocean have also begun to focus on AI applications. Tencent Yuanbao, a subsidiary of Tencent, has connected to DeepSeek, and the number of users has soared, even surpassing Doubao, a subsidiary of ByteDance. Baidu, which has the first place in the Chinese search market, has also connected to DeepSeek on its search page. At the same time, Wenxin Yiyan, a subsidiary of Baidu, announced that it will be fully free from 0:00 on April 1, 2025.
In the Chinese market, the most important AI player in 2025 is Alibaba. In February 2025, Alibaba won the cooperation with Apple China, and then in March, Alibaba launched the Qwen 2.5-Omni-7B model. The model has the ability to process text, images, audio and video, can generate text and voice responses in real time, and is small in size, suitable for terminal devices such as smartphones.
In March alone, Alibaba's shares in the US stock market have risen by more than 30%.
ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, the world's most popular short video app, is not to be outdone. It plans to invest more than $12 billion in AI chip procurement in 2025 to enhance its basic model training capabilities.
All this seems to be the same as when Android and IOS first appeared, when each company was trying to seize the entrance to smartphones. Now, who can take the lead in taking the AI super entrance?
Is it possible that a black swan event will occur and a new challenger will emerge? After all, not only the above players, but also Microsoft, AMD, and AWS have been making continuous moves recently, but who will be the winner?
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