Bloomberg: DeepSeek’s new model exerts power, the gap between China and the United States’ top AI running scores narrows to 3%

Abstract:

According to Bloomberg, Bloomberg Industry Research said that in the past few months, as models from Chinese AI labs such as DeepSeek have continued to improve, the performance lead of U.S. AI companies relative to their Chinese counterparts has shrunk sharply to a record low, putting the U.S.’s technological dominance under threat.

Robert Lea, a senior analyst at Bloomberg Intelligence, wrote in a report on Monday,

After DeepSeek released V4.1 Flash in September, China’s top model trailed its U.S. rival by just 3% in benchmark scores. The gap has narrowed from about 9% in May and 15% earlier this year.

This continued improvement in performance means that Chinese competitors will further expand their market share, he said.

Bloomberg pointed out that the rise of China’s model technology is due to the continuous deepening of its AI professional capabilities and the ability of researchers to optimize models for domestic hardware. These developments also raise questions about the effectiveness of U.S. restrictions on technology exports.

Leah said that China's progress "further calls into question whether the United States' technological dominance in the field of AI can be maintained in the long term."

DeepSeek's V4.1 Flash ranked sixth in the LiveBench global rankings last month, becoming the highest-ranking Chinese model since the startup's breakthrough with its inference model R1 in 2025. LiveBench scores responses and analysis of questions, puzzles or tasks based on AI models, a process similar to measuring human IQ.

DeepSeek’s latest score on LiveBench was 81.1 points, lower than Anthropic’s highest score of 83.4 points. Leah said that this means that the performance of the

DeepSeek model is already "comparable to the leading AI systems of Anthropic and OpenAI."

Leah cautions that such rankings are constantly changing, and monetization can be difficult regardless of a model's position on the leaderboard.