China is focusing on large language models (LLMs) in the artificial intelligence space. On Hugging Face, a repository of LLMs, Chinese LLMs are the most downloaded, according to Tiezhen Wang, a machine learning engineer at the company. Qwen, a family of AI models created by Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba , is the most popular on Hugging Face, he said. Facebook parent Meta, as well as European start-up Mistral, also have open-source versions of AI models. While the focus is on AI models right now, there is also debate over what applications will be built on top of them — and who will dominate this global internet landscape going forward.

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Persons: It's, Tiezhen Wang, Wang, Qwen, DeepSeek, we've, Grace Isford, Mistral, Paul Triolo, Isford, Xin Sun Organizations: Istock, Getty, CNBC, U.S, OpenAI's o1, Lux Capital, Facebook, Group, Google, Apple, King's College London Locations: China, U.S, Washington, OpenAI, Beijing