DeepMind CEO Says Chinese AI Firms Are 6 Months Behind the West

Google DeepMind Chief Executive Officer Demis Hassabis said Chinese artificial intelligence companies haven’t been able to innovate beyond the cutting edge of technology and remain about six months behind the frontier AI of the leading western labs.

The response to DeepSeek’s R1 model when it was released a year ago was a “massive overreaction,” Hassabis said in an interview with Emily Chang at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. “They’re very good at kind of catching up to where the frontier is, and increasingly capable of that. But I think they’ve yet to show they can innovate beyond the frontier.”