After Elon Musk’s artificial intelligence start-up xAI unveiled Grok 3, its latest chatbot, on Tuesday, the presence of a large number of Chinese developers at the company came under the spotlight.
The United States and China continue to release new AI models in a bid to outperform each other. The victor in the global AI race may be determined by the efforts of Chinese computer scientists and engineers on either side.
During a live stream on X announcing the release, Musk said Grok 3 outperformed Chinese start-up DeepSeek’s default V3 model and US-based OpenAI’s GPT-4o on science, maths and coding benchmarks.
Chinese media quickly took notice, releasing articles highlighting the Chinese talent on the xAI team, including a core member who went to Zhejiang University – the university DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng also attended.
05:00
Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?
Does the arrival of China’s low-cost DeepSeek mean the end of Nvidia’s chip dominance?
Around one-third of the founding members of xAI are reportedly of Chinese heritage, with two members present during the live stream to introduce the model to the world.