Mapping shifts in the geography of tech innovation: China becomes a big player in AI research
In 2022, 47 per cent of the world’s top AI researchers were from China, but only 12 per cent worked in the country
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 geography of innovation is shifting”, the book, which came out in July, concluded. Covering tech start-ups across China, the UK, Singapore and Canada, among other countries, author Mehran Gul said China today “is the only competitor” against the US.
“Others are trying, but they’re not good enough to be dangerous”, Gul – winner of the Financial Times/McKinsey Bracken Bower Prize, who previously covered tech topics for the World Economic Forum and the United Nations – said in his book.
“The rise of DeepSeek and China’s open-source AI models, such as Alibaba’s Qwen, have proved that China’s AI research is strong”, Gul said in an interview.
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 Holding’s Qwen family is powering the world’s top 10 open-source large language models (LLMs), according to AI developer platform Hugging Face.
Alibaba owns the Post.