AI Weekly: China closes the gap

STORY: From how China could be catching up, to a robo-dog that’s learning to walk, this is AI Weekly.

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After the launch of DeepSeek, China is now only three months behind the U.S. on AI.

That’s according to Lee Kai-fu, a prominent figure in the field and boss of Chinese startup 01.AI.

He says the gap used to be as much as nine months, and he reckons China is now actually ahead in some areas, such as infrastructure software.

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Tencent is among the Chinese companies leading the charge.

This week it launched its new reasoning model.

Dubbed T1, it’s said to be much better at processing long text documents.

:: Tencent handout

Tencent says it also suffers very few of the so-called “hallucinations” that sometimes plague AI bots.

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A robot dog has come to life in Sweden.

Startup IntuiCell says Luna has a functional digital nervous system, and can learn and adapt just like a real animal.

Co-founder Viktor Luthman says they haven’t programmed it to walk – it will learn from a human trainer instead:

“What we want to show is that machines can have genuine digital intelligence to learn new things and to solve problems that they’ve never seen before, just like humans and animals can.”

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AI chip champion Nvidia plans to invest hundreds of billions of dollars in U.S.-made semiconductors and electronics over the next four years.

That’s according to a report by the Financial Times

It quotes company boss Jensen Huang as saying Nvidia can now make its latest systems in the U.S., with help from suppliers like Taiwan giant TSMC.

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And OpenAI is planning a big global push to cement its dominance in the field.

Boss Sam Altman says Chief Operating Officer Brad Lightcap will spearhead an expansion drive.

Items on the company’s to-do list include a partnership with SoftBank and Oracle to build a network of data centers.

OpenAI is in the process of raising $40 billion in new funding to power its future growth.