Chinese AI companies gave their Western rivals the gift of anxiety for Christmas — with AlibabaBABA

slashing prices on its vision language model Qwen-VL by up to 85%. Last week, Chinese AI startup DeepSeek also released the latest version of its AI model, achieving impressive benchmark scores using fewer, older, and less capable AI chips compared to the competition.

• These aggressive moves come as GoogleGOOGL
  CEO Sundar Pichai declared 2025 a “critical year” for AI advancement, noting the business faces unprecedented competition and regulatory challenges.
• Beyond the release of its latest Gemini 2.0 model in December, Google plans to introduce numerous AI features in early 2025, as executives view the Gemini app as their next product to reach 500M users.

You must be this rich to build AI: Big Tech companies hoping for a less competitive AI ecosystem can look forward to having each other as friends, as more AI-flavored startups like character.ai duck out of the AI training rat race, prioritizing product use-cases and usefulness. That will leave a small but mighty bunch vying to build AI God first — companies like Google, OpenAI, MetaMETA

, and others… But the race to build large language models was so 2024. In 2025, it’s all about AI agents — at least until the next investor craze kicks in.