Venture capitalist and 01.AI founder Kai-Fu Lee predicts China’s AI sector will consolidate around three major AI model developers: DeepSeek,Watch Ava Online Alibaba and ByteDance, with DeepSeek currently leading in momentum. In the US, he expects Elon Musk’s xAI, OpenAI, Google and Anthropic to dominate the market. Lee noted investors in both countries are increasingly shifting focus from costly foundational AI models to applications, consumer-facing tools and infrastructure innovations.
His Beijing-based startup 01.AI ranks among China’s top six AI model developers alongside Zhipu AI, Baichuan, MiniMax, Moonshot AI and StepFun. In January, Lee announced 01.AI would abandon pre-training trillion-parameter models to prioritize smaller, faster and commercially viable systems.[Jiemian, in Chinese]