The proprietary Yi-Large-Preview is at spot 9 and the open weights Qwen2-72B-Instruct is at spot 21 (tied with Gemma-2-9B-it).
So, in this sense, it looks like they are perhaps a few months behind the leading West players (not a big gap).
Collaborations of Microsoft Research China (and other part of Microsoft Research) and Peking University produce very formidable open-source research, e.g.
and so on (I’ve seen a lot of very tempting open source research from collaborations between those two orgs).
Of course, the very existence of such a formidable Microsoft lab in China shows that “us vs. them” might be a bit simplistic, although I heard that Microsoft was recently trying to offer its people in China some attractive relocation packages.
Anyway, it’s complicated, but I think China is very good already.
We can look at concrete achievements.
Chinese LLMs are reasonably high on the Arena leaderboard https://chat.lmsys.org/?leaderboard.
The proprietary Yi-Large-Preview is at spot 9 and the open weights Qwen2-72B-Instruct is at spot 21 (tied with Gemma-2-9B-it).
So, in this sense, it looks like they are perhaps a few months behind the leading West players (not a big gap).
Collaborations of Microsoft Research China (and other part of Microsoft Research) and Peking University produce very formidable open-source research, e.g.
“WizardLM: Empowering Large Language Models to Follow Complex Instructions”, https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.12244
“WizardCoder: Empowering Code Large Language Models with Evol-Instruct”, https://arxiv.org/abs/2306.08568
and so on (I’ve seen a lot of very tempting open source research from collaborations between those two orgs).
Of course, the very existence of such a formidable Microsoft lab in China shows that “us vs. them” might be a bit simplistic, although I heard that Microsoft was recently trying to offer its people in China some attractive relocation packages.
Anyway, it’s complicated, but I think China is very good already.