China’s AI Tigers are six companies founded in China to compete against American frontier labs. They include:
- Zhipu AI, creators of the GLM model family
- Moonshot AI, creators of Kimi model family
- MiniMax
- Baichuan AI
- 01.AI, founded by Kai-Fu Lee
- StepFun
DeepSeek is not an AI Tiger despite overshadowing them, because it is a research arm of a quantitative trading firm, not an AI startup.