The belief that China is a country only good at adopting technologies at scale has been a misperception, according to the author of *The New Geography of Innovation*, a recently published book that maps the rise of new tech powers around the world excluding the US. The book, which was released in July, concludes that the geography of innovation is shifting.
Covering tech start-ups across China, the UK, Singapore, Canada, and other countries, author Mehran Gul emphasizes that China today stands as the only true competitor against the US. “Others are trying, but they’re not good enough to be dangerous,” said Gul, winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, who previously covered tech topics for the World Economic Forum and the United Nations.
Gul highlights the rise of DeepSeek and China’s open-source AI models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen, as proof of the country’s strong AI research capabilities. In September, DeepSeek’s landmark peer-reviewed article on its R1 reasoning model was published by the British journal *Nature*, marking a significant leap for China’s AI community.
Meanwhile, Alibaba Group Holdings’ Qwen family is powering the world’s top 10 open-source large language models (LLMs), according to AI developer platform Hugging Face. This development further underscores China’s growing influence and innovation in the global AI landscape.
https://www.scmp.com/tech/article/3327863/mapping-shifts-geography-tech-innovation-china-becomes-big-player-ai-research?utm_source=rss_feed
