According to American benchmarking platform LMArena created by researchers from the University of California, Berkeley, China has also become home to the world's top open-source AI models. Moonshot AI's Kimi K2, M1 from MiniMax, Alibaba Cloud's Qwen3 family and a variant of DeepSeek's R1 model were ranked ahead of Google DeepMind's Gemma 3-72B and Meta Platforms' Llama 4-Maverick, LMArena said in a report. Alibaba Cloud is the AI and cloud computing arm of Alibaba Group Holding, owner of the Post. The LMArena rankings were determined by “comparing [the models] side by side and casting votes for the better response”, LMArena said on its website. The benchmarking platform, previously known as Chatbot Arena, has been used by the likes of OpenAI to assess their AI models' performance. In a post on X, LMArena said Kimi K2 was “one of the most impressive” open-source large language models (LLMs) to date, adding that it was gaining popularity for user responses that were “humorous without sounding too robotic”. Such lofty acknowledgements of merit have apparently helped increase confidence around the world in the use of Chinese AI models, whether open source or proprietary. According to a report published this month by tech consultancy Artificial Analysis, which surveyed more than 1,000 users worldwide, 71 per cent of US respondents and 87 per cent of EU respondents expressed willingness to adopt Chinese LLMs. The survey, however, asserted a caveat for adopting these models. It found that 59 per cent of EU respondents and 58 per cent of US respondents indicated they would only use such AI models if these were hosted on non-Chinese infrastructure. That preference highlights the scrutiny Chinese models continues to face globally, a concern that analysts suggested were not unfounded. Chinese AI systems are often trained to provide “correct” answers regarding politically sensitive topics, a trait that may be viewed unfavourably by users in other countries, according to James Wang, general partner at US-based venture capital fund Creative Ventures. #🇨🇳 ChinA.I. 🤖🧠🦾🤖 https://www.scmp.com/tech..